Remember the days of Napster when 70 million users traded music, and life was good? Then the RIAA stepped in and sued Napster for copyright infringement and the happy days of sharing music for free were over. Napster then introduced Napster 2.0 which required users to pay a fee for the once free music which didn’t prove to be successful. Others have also taken the same route of offering free music, but then turn to make their service legal which then costs users money, and they fail.
Looking to the past to see how other file-sharing services have seen success in their efforts to build a legitimate business of selling music hasn’t phased Limewire who yesterday, announced that a music download store will be coming soon. The one attractive thing about it is that they will be selling DRM-free music from independent labels. DRM seems to be the route to take these days, so they at least have that going for them.
Unfortunately, when people think Limewire, they think free music. Users will presumably be offered a subscription package in which they’d be allowed a certain amount of songs every month for a set price. Those who have relied on Limewire for all of their free music certainly won’t be too interested in spending money for them.
If we look at what has happened with other file-sharing services in the past to determine what will happen here, I think we’ll see Limewire’s core user-base scattering off to find a new way to get their free music. Sorry Limewire, nice try.
Source: 901am
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Tags: Web Sites, File Sharing, Music, RIAA
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Actually when I think of Limewire I think of endless spyware and virus problems and how I hope to God my sister continues to just use iTunes.
Cabos, edonkey, DC++ here i come. Goodbye Limewire, it was nice knowing you.
Heh, that is along the lines of what I was thinking. Also, doesn’t Limewire require a $10.00 a year subscription or something?
Torrents are, and always will be the way to go.
In terms of safety, yes…in terms of reliability- no.
My friend downloaded a bunch of underoath songs from bittorrent a few weeks ago, and then when I went over to listen, I realized that none of the songs were the right songs, and most weren’t even by underoath…it was pretty dumb.
Limewire, like Napster and Kazaa before it, was just a P2P program for kids and clueless people. For a file sharing program eMule will always be the way to go, and for large files, BitTorrent is king. All other pretenders are just to keep the idiots out of the good prorams.
As of right now they make their money off of selling the “Pro” edition of their software. And the list of features you get with the Pro version is actually a little pathetic.
Yeah, I’ve had that happen quite a bit before.
I haven’t used eMule in years. Seems like you can find everything that you want on BitTorrent these days, and the speeds keep getting better and better. Everything I downloaded on eMule was always stuff pretending to be something else…or a virus.