The music business is stepping a little further toward finding ways to embrace peer-to-peer technology, with this week's announcement that Sony BMG, Universal Music Group, and Warner Music Group will distribute songs to buy on the Peer Impact file-swap network.
Former Universal Studios executive Lucy Goldenhersh helped arrange these deals for Peer Impact owner Wurld Media. "What's groundbreaking about Peer Impact is that it's a legitimate peer-to-peer offering built from the ground up, not a filtering technology built on top of an existing system," she said November 24, the day the deals were announced.
This follows on Universal Music's deal to license its entire 150,000 song catalog to Snocap, a music buying online startup begun by Shawn Fanning, the mastermind behind the original Napster, and set up as the technology provider to a coming file-swap service known as Mashboxx, preparing for a January formal launch.
"We're excited and proud to gain the cooperation of leading record labels, and we look forward to concluding even more agreements in the coming weeks," said Wurld Media chief executive Greg Kerber when the Sony, Universal, and Warner deals were done, "but we are not stopping there. Peer Impact actually revolutionizes P2P in two ways: By minimizing distribution costs and by allowing legal file sharing within a closed network. Our goal is to populate Peer Impact with the greatest, and most diverse, collection of digital content anywhere."
Kerber said online media is not divided between authorized pay-to-play music download companies and unauthorized free file swap services. "The consumer is stuck somewhere in the middle," he said, "and that's where Peer Impact comes in.
"From the beginning our objective has been to reach out to the consumer and help build a secure and legal file-sharing community, created by -- and for -- the fan, but which also ensures that digital-rights owners get compensated," he continued. "We look forward to realizing that objective with the coming launch of Peer Impact."
The music on Peer Impact would be sold either by a download store or by buyers obtaining digital keys to unlock and buy the music they want right from a fellow Peer Impact user's computer.
Wurld Media is no stranger to online file swapping: the five-year-old company gave it a shot with shopping software distributed along with file-swap software in the past, provoking published reports in 2002 to reveal merchants accusing the company of hijacking sales commissions paid when customers bought online. Kerber has called that incident the result of a software glitch long since repaired.
Kerber also said Wurld Media could be making more deals with more record labels in the coming weeks, although he didn't suggest who the labels might be and how soon the deals could get done.
