Follow the Middle Path, Grasshopper

Company seeks to thread needle between consumer freedom and people getting paid for online music:

In effect, Mediacode is attempting to re-create online what the music industry has in the physical world. There, standards for compact discs enable artists, labels, gear manufacturers, distributors and retailers to offer music and players that not only are compatible, but also make each other’s products more valuable to consumers.

In the online world, by contrast, the industry has yet to converge on the standards for making music available to distributors, enforcing the copying and playback rules set by the copyright holders, protecting against piracy, allowing consumers to use the portable music device of their choice, tracking transactions or delivering payments.

Rogers said Mediacode’s approach lets services emerge around digital music one piece at a time. The result, he said, will be “loosely coupled applications that don’t necessarily have to know everything about each other, communicating with each other over a standard language.”

One example is Internet retailing powerhouse Amazon.com Inc., which feeds album-cover art and CD information to Muse.Net and other online services in exchange for linking customers to its music store. “I’ve never talked to anyone at Amazon to get those album covers,” Rogers said, adding, “It really is revolutionary.”

A record label could use the same approach, he said, to feed promotional materials about its artists to anyone who wanted to distribute them. And labels or artists could offer songs in public collections that services such as Muse.Net could plug easily into their customers’ virtual music collections. [LA Times]

Hey, we do that. It really is great to get the cover art right on our site with a simple bit of code – it makes the site look better and is a added service for our readers.

Re the service they are discussing, sounds pretty good but completely different from P2P, which it really doesn’t address.