Comments on: Start-ups blur lines between radio, music swapping

Imagine iTunes' sharing functions available across the public Internet. Net radio's resurgence pushes technological--and legal--boundaries.

[Not Bugged]

MyPlay did this years ago

MyPlay.com which no longer exists was basically an online storage locker for your MP3's. But they allowed you to make playlists and then share them with anyone and they automatically made the playlist comply with broadcasting rules. You would email the playlist to a friend and they could click on the link and it would stream. It was an awesome service. Then they got bought by BMG and that was the end of it.

[NWLB]

The tighter they squeeze.....

If it is free or if people can do it through multiple groups, I expect the idea will take off. On some level, people will find a way to ?swap? music that doesn?t allow the record labels to sue them. The basic nature of the internet means that somebody else will find a way to automate the process and make it easy enough to do on a large scale.

I?m not commenting as to the ethics of downloading music, but I don?t see how it will ever be stopped. People were dubbing tapes in dorms since reel-to-reel machines were state of the art.

What stops anybody from checking endless numbers of CDs out of a library and dubbing MP3s of them? Nothing. And with most of these MP3 players, iPods included, the sound doesn?t have to be perfect. The harder the recording industry pushes, the closer they will get to just compelling people to make ?imperfect? copies, which totally circumvent all the precious and pointless DRM the try to implement.

NWLB
*****
http://www.nwlbnet.blogspot.com

Watch out for that 'free' trial

Talk about your deceptive advertising practices! The free trial is for 5 days, regardless of which subscription type you select. However, when you go to cancel the subscription, you must do it 3 or more business days prior to the end of the free trial. And, it takes 3-4 business days for the cancellation to take affect. Therefore, the trial is effectively 1 day, after which your stuck. That means that if you signed up for 24 months you would be stuck with the entire amount.

Caveat Emptor!

Grouper is low quality

I can't believe this story neglected to mention that music-streaming from Grouper is set at a piddly 32kbps, far below what most people encode in their own music. I tried it for a while and I like the concept, but it's not at all for consistent listening to friends' music, more just to get a taste. It's like listening to a crappy AM broadcast.

This is FAAAR from original...

My company was working on this in 1999, had infrastructure started in Feb 2000. Investors only want immediate ROI. I've got about 80 other products/services that are 6 years ahead of the nearest competitor. Come on. And it still is shy of what I can do with it. Just needs funding.

[Larue]

Qnext does this without any restrictions....

Nothing is original about this concept and even better P2P music streaming service is offered in Qnext. Not only does Qnext allow unrestricted sharing, but the music streams can be set for either 64KB or Source quality on the stream. It is also completely free to use.