MySpace Adopts Acoustic Fingerprinting

MySpace Adopts Acoustic Fingerprinting

November 2, 2006By Bill Rosenblatt

Gracenote announced on Monday that it has licensed its acoustic fingerprinting technology to MySpace, to ensure that users do not upload copyrighted music to their MySpace pages. A timetable for implementation has not been specified.

On the one hand, this could be a major development. Once it is implemented, it will be the first truly mainstream production application of acoustic fingerprinting; it leapfrogs other initiatives such as the re-launched iMesh and Mashboxx, which is still in beta. The major music companies have signed off on acoustic fingerprinting for some time, but this could be the first time when the technology will be used in a very large-scale consumer application. If it succeeds, it all but guarantees that online services that allow users to upload content will be required to use acoustic fingerprinting if they want licenses from the majors.

This announcement also makes acoustic fingerprinting a three-horse race for technology vendors: iMesh and PlayLouder use Audible Magic's technology; Mashboxx uses Philips's, and now MySpace will be using Gracenote's. (Gracenote is far from a new player in the market, e.g., Wippit has been using it for its copyright-respecting P2P service.) Three tends to be enough in markets like this, which means that other vendors of similar technology -- like MusicIP, Relatable, and Shazam -- will need to seek niche applications or find synergies with vendors of other technologies in order to survive.

At the same time, two factors mitigate the importance of this announcement. One is that MySpace users who upload copyrighted material already do so at considerable risk. First, uploading copyrighted material is a violation of MySpace's user agreement. Second, those who do upload copyrighted material on MySpace should be easier to identify than users of uncontrolled P2P networks or even YouTube. So the benefits of the technology are to make proactive and efficient a process that would otherwise be forensic and labor-intensive, and in a way, to protect users from getting themselves into trouble. In other words, it should already be possible to catch uploaders of copyrighted material on MySpace; acoustic fingerprinting just makes it easier.

The other factor that lessens the importance of this announcement is that it doesn't answer the bigger DRM-related question around MySpace, which is whether the site will enable the majors to sell downloads directly from the site with DRM. It is already possible for anyone to sell unprotected MP3s on the site. MySpace attracts an enormous number of music fans, and the majors are well aware of its promotional value for their artists and surely see huge revenue potential in selling music directly from the site instead of redirecting users to iTunes or Amazon.com. And MySpace would have to be looking seriously at the potential revenue from taking a cut of each transaction.

We won't wait for our end-of-year roundup to predict that MySpace will adopt DRM to sell music from the major labels. We suspect that it will do so after the holiday shopping season, during the relatively quiet period of the late winter or early Spring, when the negative publicity it will endure will be at a minimum. A combination of the revenue potential and parent company Fox's strong pro-DRM policy will, we believe, lead to this decision.

Ref.: http://www.drmwatch.com/ocr/article.php/3641591