A new online music service, Peer Impact, has signed deals with three major music labels -- Sony BMG, Universal and Warner. What sets Peer Impact apart is its use of a peer-to-peer distribution strategy, which was once anathema to the record labels.

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so basically they are going to get people to buy the music then when other people want to buy that same song they use the costomers band width? they get all the money and the customer has to share the file....i think thats what they plan to do..

The first three to ten purchases of a song will come directly from the record labels' catalog, he says. Further purchases by other consumers will be downloaded from these early purchasers' hard drives.

if it doesnt take off as well as hoped then perhaps they should modify their plan structure to include a free song every 10 or so songs uploaded by customers.
your thoughts?

last edited by Fuknukle at 15:56:32 28/Nov/04

its a good way to increase the speed of download but if the people who are uploading it dont ether get paid for the bandwidth or at least given some insentive to upload i think its a rip

yer for every 10mb you upload you should get to download 1mb for free :)

easy... just dont let your pc upload to their servers...

the thing is, with bt, you have to upload to dload, but its free, so you are only repaying others for allowing you to dload the file...

I think this is stupid.

rofl, these guys just don't get it AT ALL, do they?

too little too late with a gay system, it will lose.

they're about as classy as http://www.mongie.net/wtfdance.gif

Until there is a full catalogue of everything that is available on all the other P2P ones I won't be changing.

and until they start pre-ing their own releases :)

YOU LINK STEALING FAGOT!

blow it out your ear - the file's already cached locally - no extra bandwidth.

I don't mind paying $0.99US for a new, hit song, but I don't want to pay that amount for back-catalogue stuff. It should get cheaper as it gets older

the thing is, with bt, you have to upload to dload

err, that's not exactly true...

Tried Shareaza? You have full control over your uploads and can set this to 0%

A peer to peer network with 0% uploads isn't exactly that useful though :)

the thing is, with bt, you have to upload to dload

Well, yeh - that's the WHOLE POINT of a peer to peer network. That you upload.

last edited by trog at 13:09:35 29/Nov/04

A better approach for legitimate p2p selling of music is Weedshare. The music on there at the moment doesn't appeal to me but the concept does.

You can distribute the tracks however you like, cd, floppy, kazaa, ftp whatever. They use drm to create a unique id for each PC and it'll only play three times on that PC before "locking". You can however give the locked file to someone else and it resets so they get three plays as well and so on. You can buy the song if you like it and it'll play forever and if you do buy it there is some sort of tracking that works out the last licensed person the song was downloaded from. And that person gets a small percentage on sales from people who download the song from them.

So I download and buy a song. Then ten people download the song from me and five buy it - so I get a small amount money from five of those downloads. Good way to cover my bandwidth so I keep sharing the tracks.

Encourages people to buy and share the files. Keeps them cheap. Lets you sample the song a few times to see if you like it. I reckon it's the perfect model. Just hope they get more content and some nice "categorised" sites so I can buy by type of music.

^^^yeah it actually sounds like a good idea, buy a song and make money by sharing it, the company makes money you make money and the buyers get cheap music....sounds good to me

Hmm will be interesting to see if it takes off...

There are quite a few songs on there, but still no *really* good categorised index. I'd like to be able to do like with the imdb, bring up a style of music and browse it. Or see similar artists. I reckon they need a few of the bigger name artists to come onboard before it really takes off though - U2, Pearl Jam, Britney Spears :P They'd kickstart it a lot better than Heart :/

Heart!? /me runs to quickly download... NOT! :)