At the moment Last.fm, Pandora, Spotify and Rhapsody (plus all related companies) are paying to stream content to people when they already have that song locally. “Criminal” says Last.fm co-founder Richard Jones in a chat with Wire. And Jones has the sollution with his open source project Playdar.
Playdar is built around the since ‘long’ forgotten XSPF (XML Shareable Playlist Format) developed in 2004 by a group of programmers and digital music geeks including Ian Rogers of Grand Royal, Yahoo, and TopSpin Media, Robert Kaye of MusicBrainz and Lucas Gonze. The format allows people to share playlists with each other without worrying about keeping directory paths intact. The technology has now been picked up again by Playdar.
Built as an open-source software platform, Playdar knows the location of all the music on your computer and home network. Combined with services and plug-ins through its open architecture, it will enable music services to save money on bandwidth and… license fees. Because indeed, why should music services pay license fees for music that is already on your PC to start with?
Integrated (here we go again), the program could detect when you are streaming a song you have on your PC and play it from there. Gone is the license fee owed by the Spotifys of this world to the labels. But… there’s a big ‘but’. One loophole that the Wire lads forgot to think about: what to do with illegal content stored on a PC? The wole make me ask 4 questions, and for the ease I’ll give the answers as well:
- Will illegal material be recognised? I don’t think so.
- Will major labels use that excuse? Yes, I do think so.
- Will indie labels use that excuse? No, I don’t think so because they are desperately seeking a bigger market as their niche has already shrinked to an almost unreal volume.
- I it a good ideas? It’s damn excellent and almost brilliant idea, so go for it!
Below are the main involved parties.
