there's an interesting music download site that's stirring up lots of legal pots lately, even so much to be covered in boing boing and the WSJ, called allofmp3.com, a russian site that uses a loophole in russian copyright law to distribute music based on cost of bandwidth rather than the pure licesnsing cost. as i understand it, they are distributing it via licensing much like ASCAP where the artist gets paid a lump sum from some corporation based on the number of listens or something, but that's not important for this snippet.
what is important is the tech used in allofmp3.com - on the fly music transcoding. you as the user can specify how you want your songs delivered from lossless WAV all the way down to 128K MP3, and it also supports Wma, Ogg-Vorbis, Mpc, FLAC, and MPEG4/AAC. you as the user order up the song, specify the format and the song is delivered in a matter of seconds down to your machine in the desired format. based on the attention this site has gotten, it looks like it is scaling pretty well.
especially in a mobile world where this has been dubbed the "year of the music phone" - this technology is extremely relevant. transcoding servers have always been an important part of mobile infrastructure, and as more and more devices are released with various capabilities on the client, it will be more and more important for transcoding servers of rich media. someone who comes up with a carrier-grade engine for transcoding audio and video on the fly is going to make a pretty penny - and essentially allofmp3.com has done this already.
enter podcasting. soon we will see "podcasting studio" applications for publishers to author content and store in publishing engines such as typepad and blogger - surely these things will spit out multiple formats of audio. the real cost here will be bandwidth, not disk space, but there will be various clients consuming podcasts as well, and especially on mobile devices, users will be fine with a lower quality spoken word podcast in exchange for faster downloads and less bandwidth usage.
so allofmp3.com will probably continue to make money for quite some time selling music by the kb, here, but they easily have a $50 million dollar piece of tech today, $150 million piece of tech tomorrow, and who knows what this will be worth over the next two years.
Posted by Steve at February 15, 2005 02:29 AM | TrackBack