Think Tank 2 – We Have The Technology, What's The Solution? November 4, 2008

Let's Sell Recorded Music!

Illegally downloaded any music recently? Given that nearly two thirds of all internet traffic is made up of P2P activity these days, if you haven't, then most young people you know are. Since Napster first reared its head in the late nineties, the recorded music business has tried in vain to put the genie back in the bottle; the result some pr blunders and an estimated 20:1 illegal download rate.

For music fans it's been a golden age where hard to find and out of print releases have been readily available alongside the latest hits of the day, but with no way of monetising these streams the record labels have been forced to watch their profits dwindle while the world's been moving online.
The government has taken notice and is overseeing a three-pronged initiative aimed at educating and developing awareness, dealing with the most serious infringers and facilitating legitimate offerings.

This series will focus on that third prong: effective legitimate alternatives. Over the course of the four events we will review what people want, where technology is heading, what the most plausible new models are and how they might be licensed.

Think Tank 2 – We Have The Technology, What's The Solution?

How can technology enable licensed services to develop some of the functionality of existing unlicensed sites? How reliably can we sample and identify internet traffic for managing tracking and payments? Is this only possible within a walled-garden system, or is the technology available to monitor all traffic for accounting purposes? How might this sit with the notoriously privacy minded torrent communities? What are the benefits and pitfalls of using deep packet inspection and can this work for encrypted content? Is copyright filtering on a network level desirable or possible?

Are there more creative, compelling or enduring models out there? What can we learn from some of the more advanced licensed P2P platforms such as Korea's Soribada? What about licensing the end user or the access point, a la Noank, rather than the delivery platform? Might this enable music fans to continue to with their consumption habits and trusted filters in a way that better utilises the internet's potential?

How does the blue-sky models square with the needs of ISPs and device manufacturers? What kind of ISP might be interested in developing content services anyway? And would they look to do so themselves or rather to provide a platform for third parties?

And how many kids are right now in their bedrooms cooking up new ideas that will do to P2P what Napster did to the traditional business? Can we develop more futureproofed solutions or are we forever doomed to play catch up?

Official Website: http://www.musictank.co.uk