March 4, 2005 4:00 AM PST
Start-ups blur lines between radio, music swapping
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At the head of a movement that could transform online radio, Live365 and start-up Grouper are the latest to blur these lines between Internet radio and online song-swapping, with an alliance aimed at turning the older companies' stable of amateur broadcasters into the hubs of peer-to-peer communities.
The model looks to Apple's iTunes software, which lets people on the same network, such as in a dorm or office building, listen to songs from one another's music collections. Grouper's peer-to-peer service lets people stream songs at will to one another over the open Internet.
What's new:
Grouper and Live365 are blurring the lines between Net radio and file-swapping, letting people listen to one another's music collections over the Net.
Bottom line:
The Net radio business is taking off again, and start-ups are pushing at boundaries that limit what Webcasters are legally able to do.
"It wasn't first thing on our mind, but we saw a way to enable the relationships between audiences and broadcasters to go beyond just the broadcast stations," said Grouper CEO Josh Felser.
The Live365 deal and others like it are signs that the Net radio business is shaking off the gloom of the dot-com crash and pushing strongly ahead. Innovation and investment is finally coming from the start-up level and from giants such as Clear Channel and Yahoo.
In part, that's an indication that digital music in general is booming, led by Apple's success with its iPod music player and iTunes digital song store. Online radio advertising is also finally taking off, following the decision of AOL, MSN, Yahoo and Live365 to sell advertising on their radio networks collectively.
Those successes have drawn the attention of giant companies that
See more CNET content tagged:
music collection,
radio,
start-up,
broadcaster,
P2P
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
Caveat Emptor!