A rather interesting concept, to be perfectly honest.
A new online music service plans to use a P2P network to sell music from independent labels. There’s a twist: users who ’sell’ a track from their PC will get a cut of the proceeds.
(Via Ars Technica.)
From Grooveshark’s site, it appears that this will work for Windows, OS X and Linux. The payment scheme works by allowing those who have purchased songs already to earn money by helping to distribute these songs to other paying customers. Credits earned can then be used to pay for more music. Grooveshark claims that profits are split 50/50 with the user, but there is no words as to how much of the price is considered profit.
Interestingly enough, the music you share on Grooveshark doesn’t have to originally come from them. Rather, they have a filtering system to make sure that music being sent around the network is the real thing, and not some piece of spyware. As royalties are paid every time there is a download, it appears that this is legal.
While one isn’t making money on your connection per se, it seems that if you are already someone who is comfortable running a p2p client all the time and you already buy music, then you’ll end up with a much larger, and legal collection. It’s no free lunch, but it’s a rather nice perk. I can imagine users cashing in credits to download a popular song simply to earn more credits. What I’m curious about is how much this sort of scheme would reduce the amount of bandwidth the company would have to pay for, and if overzealous users
One last bit is that there is full support for indie musicians to throw their music on this site, and get paid for their downloads. I just hope this site doesn’t turn into a wasteland like MySpace.
I have just signed up for the beta, so I will post an update when I hear more.
The full article can be found here.
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3 responses so far ↓
1 Kyle // Sep 7, 2007 at 10:38 pm
These p2p structures have been around for about 5 years, and they never seem to stick around long. I think for people at large to get it, it needs to be either “I get this for free” or “I pay for this.” Anything else has the air of a scheme.
2 mikel // Sep 8, 2007 at 1:37 am
Yeah, that’s a great point. What I don’t understand is why this company isn’t willing to cut a check to those who upload more than a certain amount.
The more I thought about it, the more it feels like grinding on some lame MMO. They’re just making some number go up. We’ll have to see what the company actually delivers.
You said these have been around for a few years. Do any in particular come to mind?
3 Kyle // Sep 11, 2007 at 3:30 am
There was one they told us about in school that we all thought was going to change to p2p, and so totally didn’t. I don’t remember the exact name, but it had the word ‘weed’ in it. “WeedShare” or something.
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