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player ready...IBM says it has developed a new form of digital music distribution that will enable record labels to collect payment for every track swapped in a Napster-styled online music swapping service.
The technology, called Electronic Media Management System, allows record companies to participate in the biggest music-sharing phenomenon since the invention of the cassette tape–and get paid, too. For consumers, it means they’ll be able to continue swapping favorite tracks with friends (and strangers), but the record label will set the terms.
The label will be able to decide whether to allow copying, how often, and for how long.
For example, a record label that wants to promote an artist could put a couple of her songs up for free download until the record is released, said Joshua Duhl, an analyst for International Data Corp. of Framingham, Mass. “It gets word of mouth out on the Net.”
The IBM licensing technology essentially wraps a digital song in a secure container that either lets a surfer listen to it for free or hear just a teaser that entices the listener to go to a secure site and buy the song.
The IBM technology is the outgrowth of a trial run last year in which the five recording companies distributed music to about 1,000 consumers in San Diego. Consumers knew the experiment as Album Direct, a Columbia House-operated song vault where they could download albums and hundreds of singles.
The trials worked so well that in June, Sony Music in Japan became the first to use IBM’s technology to distribute music online. Other music industry heavy-hitters endorsed the technology, including giant record labels such as BMG, whose parent Bertlesmann AG invested millions in Napster, the makers of Internet media players RealNetworks and MusicMatch, and manufacturers of MP3 players like Toshiba.
IBM’s music distribution technology–known in the industry as superdistribution, for its ability to pass along content to multiple recipients–is designed to work in tandem with digital rights management technology IBM helped create for portable devices. Next-generation MP3 players will come with a built-in copyright protection called Content Protection for Recordable Media, which effectively binds music to flash memory cards and other removable media, so it can’t be copied without permission.
“This only works with rights-protected media,” said Scott Burnett, head of content distribution for IBM Global Media and Entertainment.
“For the music industry, if you write to any open media, once it’s in the clear, consumers will rip that file and stick it up onto Napster.”
Sony already implemented the system in Japan in which consumers pay a fee to download music to their Sony memory stick, which they can listen to in their portable MP3 player.
IBM isn’t the only company to provide rights protection over a Napster-like peer-to-peer network. Centerspan, which acquired the film and MP3 search engine Scour, plans to relaunch the service with its own form of copy-protection, said Phil Leigh, digital media analyst for the Raymond James Financial, an investment bank.
But it could provide the basis for converting Napster’s 51 million users into paying customers–especially given BMG’s endorsement of IBM’s distribution technology.