The Viktoria Institute in Gothenburg, Sweden, is working on a concept they call PUSH MUSIC, which is software that automatically shares music files with nearby users who have similar tastes. It monitors the listening history of the user, and develops awareness about what kind of new music he might like. The concept envisions Wi-Fi-enabled music players that automatically establish a peer-to-peer connection, enabling people to either "browse" the music collections of others and take a copy of whatever they like, or — here’s the magic part — just automatically receive music the software has selected for you.
Here is the link, and comments are open for those who know more about this. Here are the comments from www.digg.com. Can you be liable if some other listener "pushes" stolen property onto your computer? Will the risk of passing malicious code make this unworkable?
Hi,
There’s a service somewhat similar to this, called Pandora. (Live link not possible due to HTML restrictions. URL is http://www.pandora.com .)
But as far as I can tell from their site, all of their music is fully licensed.
Their concept is that you cite a particular musical group you like, say, Led Zeppelin, and it streams music it deems “musically similar” to Led Zeppelin.
Regarding the question asked in the subject, not a chance.
Even if music sales were eliminated, licensing would remain ($US0.5b and growing — http://www.ifpi.org/site-content/publications/rin_order.html ), though one can imagine a very distant world in which game, television and film revenues are similarly destroyed, and thus don’t license music, though that still leaves liesning for venues and advertising…
But this isn’t going to eliminate music sales. It is a research project. Collaborative filtering has been done many many times for music. Wonderful in theory, only ok in practice.
Apple iTunes does a similar local network search. I was able to play music (legally!) that was on someone else’s harddrive. That’s how, for example, I realized that the Buena Vista Social Club CD was worth buying.
It’s good that you’re thinking about security concerns, but (and this is from a computer science PhD student) malicious code does not need to be a problem. As for pushing stolen property, all shares could go through some central server that digitially signs everything. Thus, unless people hack into their players and install their own software, you can actually be sure that people who want to keep all content legal can do so.
(In other words, there exists a solution such that the only way to get something pushed illegally on to you is if you yourself wish that to happen and take direct actions to subvert the security.)
Through the use of the new system, PUSH MUSIC, users are able to obtain music through each other by taste in music. Although this is helpful in finding out about new bands, it doesn’t stop the use of illegal downloads through programs like Limewire. It is merely just another software program used to share and receive music that might possibly have viruses attached to it. Using PUSH MUSIC is just another program like iTunes. Music sales will stay the same because PUSH MUSIC does not have anything new or exciting to offer its’ customers.
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