A Copyfighter’s Musings

Via Postplay comes this article
from News.com about Mercora’s new web-based music search tool. 
Let me counter a bit of the hype: in terms of Mercora’s core features,
this is unremarkable. It is merely a web-based version of the existing
Mercora software.  The ability to search for and instantaneously
play particular artists or songs is already available through the
Mercora client. As in the software client, you can only access content
that is at that very moment being streamed by one of Mercora’s
users.  All this does is allow you to do so through a web
browser after you’ve already installed the Mercora software.

Though SoundExchange’s John Simson states that they’re evaluating the
legality of the new web-based service, the legal questions appear no
different than for the software client. Mercora can provide these
on-demand streams in a lawful way by ensuring that each individual
user is following the DMCA guidelines
for non-interactive webcasting. So far as I can tell, Mercora violates
no law regarding on-demand streaming because they are not actually the
ones streaming. They’re just providing a search engine for songs
currently being streamed by the myriad individual Mercora users. 

This feature is fairly cool, at least for popular content.  Even
though there are plenty of Mercora users with rarer tracks, the rarer
the content the more unlikely it is to be webcast at the moment you
want it.  Also, streams through Mercora can sometimes be slow and
of unreliable quality.

News.com suggests that Yahoo! or other music stores might enter this
arena, and that makes some sense. Rather than streaming mere 30 second
clips, music stores could allow customers to try out whole songs before
they buy them.  Mercora currently provides links to Amazon if you
want to purchase a song you’re currently listening; such a feature
would be much more powerful if folded directly into a music
store.  Of course, this assumes that most consumers remain purely
in a pay-per-download mode.  The more consumers shift over to
on-demand services like Yahoo!’s and Rhapsody, the more these on-demand
Mercora webcasts become irrelevant; in terms of quality and reliablity,
Mercora’s on-demand streams are certainly inferior. You might sometimes
be able to find a
stream on Mercora that you can’t find in Yahoo!’s music store catalog,
but that only makes this a worse fit for the music stores, because then
the streams can’t drive people to purchases  Then again, Rhapsody
and Yahoo! both have radio stations with content that can’t be found in
their on-demand streaming and downloads catalog, so, in that light,
including a feature like Mercora might still be worthwhile.

Filed by Derek Slater at 1:48 am under General news
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