David Emery Online

Legal P2P Music Service Doomed to Fail

17 August 2008

The number one rule for BitTorrent users is: Share. If you don’t share – upload files to others – your download speeds will reduce dramatically. This means that it could take hours instead of minutes to download an album from your favorite BitTorrent site. What Playlouder will offer is a highly degraded version of BitTorrent, and subscribers will not be able to get the great download speeds they are so accustomed to.

I wondered the exact same thing when I first heard of Playlouder’s plans. They offer a ‘legal p2p’ model, where for a flat fee to your ISP you get to download as much music of p2p sites as you can, legally. The catch is it won’t actually work – the p2p traffic is restricted to within their closed network, so for any sharing to work the original uploader must be on the closed network as well, which is extremely unlikely.

Legal p2p actually manages to be no p2p, in this case – a fairly novel way of removing the illegal downloading problem…