R.I.P. AudioGalaxy

[TankGirl]

Kuro5hin published this interesting story by Kennon Ballou, one of the AudioGalaxy developers. There is plenty of interesting first hand information of what went on behind the scenes both technically and community-wise on the increasingly popular service and how the RIAA eventually killed the good thing despite their serious efforts to comply with the demands of the copyright nazis.

Online Community

After the initial functionality of the website, I'd say that probably 90% of the code I wrote was not related to actual file sharing. We spent immense amounts of time and effort developing the community aspects of Audiogalaxy. There were comment boards attached to almost every entity on the site, as well as groups. Groups were designed to bring listeners of similar genres together, and by all accounts, were a rousing success. Each user had her own profile page that could be customized to show their favorite artists and styles. A vibrant community sprang up through all the different groups and genres. While there was certainly a fair amount of useless posts, there also was quite a bit of good communication going on. We also implemented a web-based instant messenging system.

One of my favorite features gave you the ability to see which users had used the site in the last 90 seconds, broken down by country or state. Its fascinating to look and see people from all over the world that you can talk to.

Besides the community features, our music staff also actively reviewed music and wrote lots of articles. While the writers often were overly vitriolic and suffered from acute cases of music snobbery, most readers failed to realize that much of their disdain for music was designed to make the reader mad. It always amused me how someone would spend 15 page loads posting messages saying how much he hated Audiogalaxy and the writers.

Our whole direction as a company was not to merely provide file sharing services; we wanted to have a community of music afficianados actively seeking out new music. As I mentioned above, I bought a TON of CDs while I worked at AG, and virtually all of them were from music I found out about and previewed as an mp3. It was amazing to be talking to someone about their favorite band that you saw listed on their profile page, queue it to your satellite, and by the end of the conversation already be listening to that music. For several bands that are now some of my favorites, I went from never having heard of them to loving them in literally 5 minutes. From discussions I've had with many of my friends, they had similar experiences. The whole system made it easy to find new music; that was what it was designed to do, and at its height it did it brilliantly.

The Suit

If you havent skimmed the RIAA's suit against Audiogalaxy, I would suggest that you do. Its a brilliant case of misinformation. It alleged that AG was woefully inadequate at stopping piracy, and in a classic quote, mentions that AG's filtering system "could have been done better by a first year programmer". It also alleged that Audiogalaxy existed solely to profit off of copyright violations, and thus should pay back royalty compensation.

As I've tried to establish in this article, AG provided extensive extra value to its users. But it doesnt really matter; the RIAA is a 3000 lb gorilla, and even if AG had tried to fight this in court, perhaps they could have won some sort of victory but it would have been pyhrric at best. The RIAA has the money to stomp anybody smaller, and they're showing what they can do. Unless backed by a truly large corporation with pockets a mile deep, I really don't think any p2p company is going to be able to stand up to the RIAA.

But the RIAA is doing exactly what it was designed to do; protect the interests and business model of its member recording companies. Its doing this brilliantly. Its true that they won't be able to stop peer-to- peer applications for good, but they will be able to stomp on the companies or individuals who create them for a long, long time. And they have the patience to keep stomping. Theyre playing whack-a-mole with an infinite supply of tokens.

Recommended reading.

- tg