CrowdSpirit

Make money legally from your MP3 collection

posted by siliconglen on 19 September 2007 0:14 Go to forum

Problem context :

MP3s are huge business but the profits are concentrated in the hands of relatively few players such as iTunes and it also isn't  easy to download tracks unless you have a PC. So why not download them from other MP3 players and then you can get the tracks of your choice without need to be near a computer and you can share your own tracks and make money too. Truly distributed peer to peer music sharing.

 

Ever listened to the radio and wanted to buy a track but not been near the Internet?

Ever been to a concert and wanted the artist's tracks right away but its too slow or expensive to download to your phone?

Ever wanted to make money from all those MP3s you've collected. Legally?

How about you go to see a film and want the song soundtrack on your MP3 player before you leave the cinema?

Ever got a bit envious at the vast amounts of money iTunes makes and want a bit of that yourself?

Proposed Solution :

1. Person A goes on the net, downloads the latest track to their MP3 player. This player would be similar to existing MP3 players except it would have wi-fi, bluetooth and replacable parts (ie you could upgrade the memory easily, download the latest software for it without having to chuck out the phone and start again).

2. Those legally downloaded tracks result in payment going to the store, the record company and the artists (royalties). Now that the tracks are on your phone, you are the store.

3. You set up your phone to broadcast your tracks via wi-fi or bluetooth.

4. Person B hears a track playing on the radio or has a subscription to their favourite artists latest songs, or they see on their phone when browsing the web that a new track is available but it would be too expensive and slow to download to their phone. So they program the track and artist into their CrowdSpirit MP3 player onto a want list (like Amazon's wish list).

5. Person Bs MP3 player broadcasts the want list and and a compatible player that already has the relevant tracks responds. This would be particularly effective in a busy office, the underground, clubs, cinemas, concerts, places where very large numbers of people are gathered.

6. The tracks are then downloaded at high speed from the device. This allows tracks to be downloaded faster than via a phone, in places such as concert venues or undergrounds where there is no internet access or even in cinemas where the cinema playing a movie could broadcast the movie soundtrack and people could have it downloaded to their p2p mp3 players as they watch the film.

7. The track cost is deducted from personB's account, and distributed as before to the record label, the artists and rather than the online shop it has gone into personA's account (or the business broadcasting the tracks: cinema, concert venue etc) as a credit. Thus individuals can make money from broadcasting their tracks and there is clearly an incentive to be the first to download so that you can share and make money.

 

How does the e-commerce part work?

Consider the analogy with pre-pay mobile phones and payment cards. You swipe your card, the machine connects to a computer, the computer talks to your mobile phone network, your account is credited and you get a text with your new balance on it. A similar scheme would work for "charging" the MP3 players with money (indeed this system could work on mobile phones themselves). The mp3 player has a linked card which is swiped and the "money" is sent as a signal from the payment till to the MP3 unit via bluetooth/wifi with an encoding such that only that player can use the money. The reverse would happen if the person had been sharing lots of MP3s successfully, the track and credit information would be broadcast to the payment device in the shop, the person would get their cut and the balance would be distributed back to the artists and record companies (the till would have a connection to the Internet to send payment electronically, eg via paypal). Tracks would be encoded to minimise fraud

 

Thus I propose a new peer to peer e-commerce model which would start with Mp3 tracks but in time could scale to videos, digital radio in your car where if you like the track playing it downloads to your MP3 player. More generally the idea would work for want lists for Christmas/birthdays with shops responding if they sold matching products, recommendations looking for places to eat etc etc. The same "I want you provide" peer to peer model would even work as an automatic dating agency in a bar. The possibilities are truly endless. You could even advertise your house for sale and cut out the middleman.

I spent 10 minutes thinking up this idea, rather less than the hours I spent thinking up an idea for a touch screen browser in 1990 (see Craig Cockburn pagelink)