Business | Technology
Take the legal route to online music
It was bound to happen. Someone finally found a way to operate a file sharing site without getting sued out of existence.
- By Scott Shuey, Chief Reporter
- Published: 00:38 December 15, 2007
It was bound to happen. Someone finally found a way to operate a file sharing site without getting sued out of existence.
Enter Imeem.com. It's hard to keep track of all the peer to peer (P2P) sites out there, and until last week, Imeem didn't seem like anything unusual. Then the deals got signed with Sony, BMG, EMI and Universal, and Imeem found itself in uncharted territory: not on the naughty list of music industry lawyers.
That's no small feat, but the amazing part is Imeem's solution. In exchange for letting the site continue to offer free music, Imeem will now hand over a percentage of their advertising revenue to the recording giants, who in turn will license their library to Imeem. It's brilliant.
They didn't come up with something new or innovative to handle online piracy; instead, they used an idea that's older than dirt. TV and radio have worked along the same lines for 85 years.
The fine print
Now, there is a small catch. You can't actually download the songs; you can just "stream" them. That means that you can listen, but the song won't actually be on your computer. That means you won't be able to put the songs on your MP3 player. To do that, you're still going to have to pay.
That may be a deal breaker for some. Are the millions of iPod and Zune users out there going to give up their major source of free, albeit illegal, music? Probably not, but who knows?
Simply offering an alternative site where people can listen to the music they like without worrying about the cyber-police knocking on their doors is a step in the right direction. The ad revenue could certainly be the band-aid the recording industry is looking for. People are still going to pirate music, just like they did before the advent of digital music, but in comparison to the pirating going on today, it may be small potatoes.
Even if the stratagem doesn't work and the illegal downloading of music continues en mass, legal sites are going to make it hard for illegal P2P sites to compete for the advertising dollars. P2Ps currently aren't the best place to be - files are frequently mislabelled and the risk of malware is high - so why would a user go to those site when the alternative is a, presumably, well-maintained, friendly environment? It is likely that legal sites will make it hard for illegal ones to maintain their old level of advertisement revenue.
Of course, if it does work, Imeem's days will be numbered. While the company may have found a way to finally make money by offering free music, it's now faced with the unenviable position of being the middleman. It won't take long before the music giants figure out how to get ride of them.
Imeem may be helping save the industry from piracy, but it's going to cause a lot of trouble for other people. If recording labels can coordinate direct music sales through their own sites, who knows? Maybe even Apple's iTunes will feel the pressure.
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