Start-ups blur lines between radio, music swapping

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have stayed away from Net broadcasting for years. Clear Channel has hired America Online Webcasting guru Evan Harrison, who is in the midst of launching an ambitious Net radio push for the broadcast giant. Rival Infinity Broadcasting also said this week that it would put much of its talk-radio programming online.

But as in the late 1990s, new companies are increasingly beginning to seek ways around the restrictive rules that govern Net radio playlists. According to current copyright law, Net radio services are allowed to play any songs without getting permission first, but they can't let listeners choose when they want to hear a specific song, and they can't play songs by the same artist back-to-back.

Enter peer-to-peer. By allowing songs to be streamed from other listeners' hard drives, companies like Grouper and Mercora hope to work within the rules but still provide something close to an on-demand experience.

On-demandish
In Mercora's case, every person in the network streams a list of songs, and listeners can search across the network to find a specific tune or artist at any given moment.

In Grouper's case, listeners can search for specific songs on the hard drives of a group no larger than 30 people. By keeping the communities small, Grouper executives say, providing access to the music is more like playing a song for a friend than like true Net broadcasting, and is thus allowable by law.

Grouper's software goes further, allowing people to download photos, video files or documents off the hard drives of people in their small group. The company has blocked downloads of songs, hoping to avoid the ire of record labels.

The company's software is available freely online. Live365 executives say they see the groups as a way for their network of thousands of amateur broadcasters to extend their reach, and the company has now built the Grouper software into its service.

"It is another way our broadcasters can share their tastes and talents with their audience," said Dave Porter, Live365's director of business development.

Record labels have so far taken a hands-off approach to these new services. A representative for the Recording Industry Association of America declined to comment specifically on the Grouper model.

Certainly, music labels have not been shy about suing Webcast services they believe are crossing legal lines. Several years ago, they filed suit against a handful of services they said were giving listeners too much control over the choice of music.

Digital Media Association, or DiMA, Executive Director Jon Potter, who represents Webcasters in Washington, D.C., said the emergence of the new services is a sign that his industry is rebounding after a long dry spell.

"There's a lot of innovation going on that we're just beginning to see that's going to make this a fun industry again," Potter said.

[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.