[Drakonix]

I watch TechTV occasionally, I didn't see the presentation you are referring to. If it's been on TechTV, it has been made public. You would think the company involved would want to generate interest in it's name and new product.

Interesting idea, but it has a number of stumbling blocks to overcome.

Unless this company pays the RIAA and friends for licenses, it would be just as "infringing" in the eyes of the RIAA to upload music tracks to the new service as it is to download the same tracks from any current p2p network. If they pay for the licenses, they can get copies of the music in digital format directly from the music companies without needing subscribers to upload the music to them. This would remove the tremendous headache of policing the quality of uploaded tracks. If I subscribed to such a pay service and got poor quality rips, I would be VERY unhappy.

[Devil's Advocate] If I am going to be a part of the RIAA (and other companies) distribution chain, I want to be compensated for this. I have expenses! Internet connection, power consumption, equipment procurement, maintenance, fancy lunches, booze, loose women etc. just like they do. I'll need at least a DS3 internet connection paid for by them so I can upload at a more reasonable rate. DS3's do 45 megabits per second and cost around $20,000.00 per month - that's peanuts to them. I'll need a salary with a broad benefits package. A salary of about 1.5 million dollars per year sounds fair to me, with fully paid medical/dental/vision benefits at my choice of providers. Retirement at 5% per year at age 55 after 5 years. Continuance of fully paid medical/dental/vision care as when employed. Hell, it's less than the value they have already placed on "shared tracks".[/Devil's Advocate]

Most broadband connections (for home use) favor downstream speed over upstream speed. Higher upstream speeds normally mean much higher monthly costs for the connection. For example, my ADSL line is 1.5 megabits downstream, but only 328 kilobits upstream. It would take a very long time to upload my entire MP3 library, at the fastest I can go, about 320 kilobits/second. It would be easier (and cheaper) to send them a hard drive with the stuff on it, or burn the MP3's onto DVD-R disks.

Lots of folks have the same tracks, and the quality of the rips vary considerably. Not everyone rips with care, and sometimes folks do fade-ins, fade-outs, over-normalization and other things that are not always desirable. There are also the instances of tracks taken from alternate takes or sessions. Often, the sound isn't the same as the popular version of the track. Add to that recordings made during live performances. Some like them, some don't. The audio in a live performance is just not the same quality as a studio recording.

It is not technically possible to improve the quality of a rip made at a slower bit rate. Say we have a track ripped at 128k and convert it to .wav, do whatever we want in terms of clean-up and then re-convert it to MP3 at 320k. Since the source track was an MP3 at 128k, the resulting track encoded at 320k will not improve in quality.

Unlimited downloads is a good idea, and I hope such a service becomes successful. Unfortunately, I don't think the music industry is going to allow unlimited access to tunes for about $21.66 per month (when paid by the year). That's less than the price of two average CD's, and less than some premium CD's.

The RIAA's legal and anti-piracy gestapo workforce is big and getting larger by apparent great leaps and bounds. It's got to be putting a crimp in the budget for them. They have become used to those fancy lunches, booze and loose women - so they are probably going to seek additional funding (from music fans of course).

If the music industry was smart they would have embraced the digital age a long time ago. They are suing their customers, and running an antiquated business model into the ground. This proves they are not smart in the business practice area. They have only proved that intense greed exists, and that they are giving artists and their fans the short end of the deal for years. IMO the music industry is using copyright for an illegal, anti-competitive purpose. The bolder and more ridiculous they get, the easier it will be to prove the anti-competitive nature of the business. Once that has been proved they can lose all claim to any copyrights and it all becomes public domain.

Such an idea might work better for older or rare music that the industry doesn't want to mess with. Unfortunately, if it becomes popular with the subscribers, the RIAA will no doubt have renewed interest in it and want their piece of the action.