New Music Model Proposed by Vivendi and MS

Jon Healy/LATimes has this on a tollgate for the internet. Evidently, Vivendi Universal Music Group and Microsoft are teaming up to work on something that will work with P2P sharers (good), making use of digital delivery for spreading content and compensating artists.

File-sharing networks ... can distribute digital material wrapped in electronic locks that enable copyright owners to charge users for the contents. But the dominant brand of electronic lock, which Microsoft provides, has limited capabilities, said Albhy Galuten, senior vice president for advanced technology at Universal Music Group.

"It doesn't provide any sort of complex or innovative business models, which is why nobody uses it," he said.

Universal, Microsoft and the other companies — Japanese telecommunications giant Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp., chip maker ARM Holdings, Internet security company VeriSign Inc. and rights-management specialist Macrovision Corp. — have joined forces in what they call the Content Reference Forum.

So people would participate in networks where media is tagged with "content references," which would trigger a series of electronic signals that determined the type of file, the amount it would cost, and how the proceeds would be divided.

Alternative pricing options include things like this: a record label could offer an album free to the first 5,000 people who download it, then charge $2 to the next 5,000 people, then $5, and so on.

We've discussed the gaming possibilities here before, and the privacy issues, and the conference at Harvard last week touched on these problem areas as well. Or maybe this system isn't so new, just the alternate compensation system, with a haircut and some new glasses, that been discussed in various forms for a while. But now, put into practice, it seems different, but the same?

Since I've gotten sick here at the end of the semester, I'm lite on blogging. But I'm working on a more comprehensive post responding to Derek's post yesterday.

Posted by Mary Hodder at December 10, 2003 07:43 PM