GrooveShark - P2P With New Business Model

[DudeAsInCool]

In his article at Zeropaid, SoulXTC takes a look at GrooveShark, a new P2P music site, which promises to compensate both copyright owners and users. Sounds almost too good to be true.

"Grooveshark will be a P2P music file-sharing community that will broker music transactions between members. It will charging for the songs exchanged between members on the site, Grooveshark will compensate copyright holders and users while providing the convenience and selection of P2P file-sharing in an online music community. All Grooveshark files will be DRM-free, allowing users to play the songs they purchase on any PC or portable digital music player.

Grooveshark will supposedly combine the best of P2P file-sharing and online music download sites into one convenient service. Users will be able to browse songs uploaded by other members and then pay to download these DRM-free MP3 files.

Songs will vary in price, but none will cost more than 99 cents. Grooveshark will then pay the appropriate royalties to music copyright holders by taking commissions from users' transactions and then also compensate users with free music for community participation such as uploading songs, fixing song tags, flagging unwanted files or reviewing music. Members will be rewarded based on their level of contribution to

the Grooveshark community."

Read more at ZeroPaid. Get on GrooveShark's Mailing List

[DudeAsInCool]

The people behind Grooveshark, the groundbreaking new P2P music download service, answer the tough questions like what benefits users will get from contributing, what content they can contribute, and what the they think of the RIAA and the IFPI.

How will users preexisting music libraries be incorporated into Grooveshark, and will there be an effort to scan content for pirated music?

There will be a *very* small java-based plugin which will index each user's music files locally and facilitate p2p file transfers. It will be very simple, as the online parts of the system will do most of the work. Imagine µtorrent's behavior, with a web-based interface, connected to a rich user-driven community and a host of other features.

How our users originally acquired their music won't matter to us; all that matters to us is that the copyright holders get appropriately paid for their work within our marketplace. We are embracing the power of p2p while enabling copyright compensation to occur. In a sense, we are legitimizing files that were once deemed "pirated"—once a file enters Grooveshark, any transactions of that file within our system will be legal, paid for, and will compensate the copyright holders.

Read more at ZP

[CTC Command]

I'm going to download this right away. NOT.