A Legitimate P2P Network?????

Free music has continually been shown as a great way to get a band exposure for their music, and can be utilized to promote sales for independent and signed artists (ie Radiohead releasing ‘In Rainbows’ as a pay what you will to fans). Free music allows fans and potential fans the ability to have a taste of your music at no risk to them, which in the end helps promotes sales, since if a fan truly enjoys your music, most likely they will take the extra step to purchase your music and additional merchandise. Enterprising artists like Jonathan Coulton, David Byrne/Brian Eno, and many more have used the ability of enticing fans with free music and then presenting special bundle packages at higher price brackets to bring in revenue. TopSpin as a service is really good at providing a platform for artists to provide these special products to their customers. In addition, using free music for fan aggregation, (exchanging a free track for an email address), is a very useful tactic for building a fan base using free music.

The whole issue of trying to make file-sharing networks legit is a whole other animal unfortunately. One benefit of making file-sharing networks legitimate would be that publishers would be given an avenue to collect on royalties due to songwriters; an avenue, which previously was completely bypassing copyrights. Furthermore many file-sharing networks (like Pirate Bay for example) are seeking ways to become legitimate, since as an illegitimate service their years are numbered (like Morpheus, Limewire, Napster, Kazaa, etc.) (check out http://gigaom.com/video/wayne-rosso-how-legit-p2p-could-be-done-right/) The problem p2p networks deal with is that to launch a legitimate authorized music service, the licensing of music would cost anywhere from $20-$30 million dollars. (per Gigaom article). If the industry was able to come up with a more reasonable cost to licensing their content, possibly more P2P networks could become really legitimate. Furthermore labels would need to be willing to release a lot of out of print material into the public via these networks so that the legitimate P2P networks would truly be the best source for ALL available content. Once the networks were legitimate, there would need to be a good passive way of monitoring the downloading of content, so as to figure out how to pay out artists and labels fairly based on the volume of consumption of their content. Possibly a federal tax could be proposed to charge for the usage of the content provided to the public for free? The more and more I look at this, the more it looks like it will become something like a subscription service like Rhapsody, except that it would allow the ability to download files freely to be utilized as a consumer sees fit.

The thing that is fascinating right now, is a service like Pirate Bay already charges about $6.00 a month for premium members who want to hide their IP addresses in order to escape legal scrutiny. Changing this monthly fee to a membership for using the service is not much different to the users of the service, and ensures that the copyright holders are finally being compensated themselves. (http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/05/a-legit-pirate-bay/)

Possibly a service that P2P networks could provide for musicians and labels, is that every time a consumer wants to download a given track or album, it would require or give the option to the downloader to sign up for the artists email list (like TopSpin’s fan aggregation tactic), and would at least provide artists with lists of potential fans they could try and up sell their special bundle music packages to.