Legal form of peer to peer can revolutionize online music sales

(I-Newswire) March 13, 2005 - Who doesn´t envy real music aficionados every now and then for the huge collections of digital music on their PCs? But logging on to their computers and downloading titles is illegal. Musicload is thinking about new ways, however, how private individuals can swap music legally while respecting rights to the titles. "We know how successful illegal swap exchanges can work," says Susanne Peter, Director of Marketing and Sales at T-Online´s Musicload. "Unfortunately, we haven´t had anything like this for sale in the music industry so far. And that is an opportunity which has yet to be taken advantage of - the formation of a real community."

How is legal peer to peer supposed to work? First of all, the original idea that Internet swap exchanges are based on still applies - although there are a few differences. For one thing, the holders of rights are involved in the system. Moreover, the providers offering titles guarantee high-quality files. The peer-to-peer model shows how users can link up with each other in the future, recommend music titles and swap them legally.

Simple principle
Here is one possible peer-to-peer scenario: Customer A enters a music portal as a buyer. He has registered his own music shop there and put together playlists. He then makes these playlists available to customer B, who is able to look at the playlists and their commentaries and recommendations and look for his favorite song titles. The next step is for customer B to download the titles onto his own hard disk directly from provider A´s hard disk. The files transferred are provided with the provider's legally acquired digital rights, which means that no copyrights are violated. Users of this service continue to pay a fee for each song - and the private provider gets a cut, too. He receives bonus points for transferring songs, for example, which he can use to purchase new titles at his favorite music portal.

Helping users communicate and promoting the community - while at the same time creating incentives for the legal exchange of music files. This is the concept being presented by Musicload at CeBIT.



Musicload from T-Online was launched on October 11, 2003. The portal now figures among the leading providers of legal music downloads. Musicload reached a total of 4,000,000 downloads in 2004. In the meantime, users download around 1,000,000 songs each month. With an offer that comprises almost 450,000 tracks, Musicload is particularly successful in the top ten singles charts. The T-Online platform works with all major record companies as well as independent labels. One track from Musicload costs between 99 cents and 1.59 euros, with album prices starting at 9.95 euros.

Award for quality: Musicload is Computer-BILD test winner in a comparison with twelve other providers (issue 1/2005, "Test: Music Download Offers").

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