CyberBubba Central - MP3 Alternative Sources

Last Monday night, a legion of music fans logged on to Audiogalaxy only to find that their song queues were suddenly empty and that every single tune on the network was blocked. Mailing lists of every stripe buzzed about the news the next day. What was going on?

The Audiogalaxy site was still up, the Satellite software could still connect, and searches continued to return results. And yet every search--even for songs that were not already blocked voluntarily by Audiogalaxy at the behest of record companies--returned a page saying "SEARCH PROHIBITED. You cannot request this song due to copyright restrictions. Please try a different search." Unbelievably, even all songs by the band currently promoted on the top


Audiogalaxy's settlement agreement with the music industry forced the service to block songs

spot of Audiogalaxy.com (Danielle Howle and the Tantrums) were blocked. And original numbers that I'd recorded myself and never released were obstructed. No record label--let alone one that's represented by the RIAA--is affiliated with my songs, and yet Audiogalaxy's settlement agreement with the music industry forced the service to block my tunes, against the will of the copyright holder: me.* [Editor's note: Please see the footnote below for clarification.] Why? Because now, instead of allowing songs to flow freely until the company is told differently, Audiogalaxy must block songs until it is told otherwise by the (often multiple) copyright holders of each file.

While this might make sense to those who think it's illegal to share MP3s of any kind, it came as a total shock to me. Audiogalaxy is the only file-sharing app that's playing ball with the labels and blocking songs when requested. As a result of such filters, all you could find by the most popular artists were remixes, live recordings, or demos--stuff that's generally not for sale anyway. But I must concede that it was easy to obtain many copyrighted MP3s on Audiogalaxy, ostensibly either because the labels that released the songs hadn't asked the company to bar them or because a file sharer had mislabeled the tunes so that they circumvented the blocks.

Conspiracy theories
So, what could have spawned the RIAA/Audiogalaxy lawsuit and settlement?

Theory one: The RIAA went after Audiogalaxy because the lawsuit would set a precedent that the Napster case never quite did: namely, that file-sharing services are solely responsible for altering their central databases to block copyrighted songs whose owners don't want them traded. The words of RIAA head Hilary Rosen are telling: "This should serve as a wake-up call to the other networks that facilitate unauthorized copying. The responsibility for implementing systems that allow for the authorized use of copyrighted works rests squarely on the shoulders of the peer-to-peer network."

Theory two: The RIAA really thinks that it can just make file sharing go away. That is not likely.

Theory three: Maybe there was a secret backroom deal. Since the service is incredibly popular and was the only file-sharing site to voluntarily block the songs that the RIAA requested, perhaps Audiogalaxy settled in exchange for, say, exclusive file-sharing licensing of all major-label content. Such a deal would give Audiogalaxy the chance to partner with the labels to produce the legitimate online-music distribution system that the labels still haven't properly released.

Theory four: The RIAA is trying to drive fans and P2P networks toward a decentralized underground where they'll be harder to regulate.

The RIAA's settlement with Audiogalaxy calls to mind at least two ghosts of file sharing's past. First, there's the ghost of Napster, which is still hampered by an ongoing lawsuit with the RIAA even as it tries to build a service that will appease the record industry. Second, it recalls the specter of MP3.com's Beam-It service, which streamed music to users who inserted a hard copy of a CD containing those songs into their drives--something I still can't believe that the labels fought.

Audiogalaxy is now completely hobbled and will surely lose traffic and members at the rate of thousands per day.

The demise of the old Beam-It service most closely resembles Monday's shutdown of Audiogalaxy. Unlike some other file-sharing networks, Audiogalaxy played along with the music industry, blocking every instance--or so it claimed--of songs specified by the record labels. This was very similar to the way that Beam-It compromised by requiring you to insert a legit CD before it streamed the songs to your PC. Audiogalaxy is now completely hobbled and will surely lose traffic and members at the rate of thousands per day. Meanwhile, Gnutella-based file-sharing apps, which use a decentralized--and, thus, impossible to police--network, can return completely unblocked results without drawing lawsuits.

Why consumers will turn to Gnutella
How will consumers react to these developments? At this very moment, ex-Audiogalaxy users are e-mailing friends and asking what service they should switch to. As many former Napster users did, these folks will start moving toward those very decentralized networks that the RIAA has been tolerating out of necessity. Eventually, those users will flee to networks that are even harder to shut down than Gnutella, such as the nascent Freenet network. Theory four, outlined above, is clearly against the labels' best interests, and yet their actions are causing exactly that scenario.

Here's what a few Audiogalaxy users had to say. Their names have been changed for their protection, as the maximum penalty for each song that they downloaded is $10,000:

MP3 Insider: What was your reaction when you logged on to Audiogalaxy and saw your download queue deleted and every song blocked?

Steven Hanley: At first, mild confusion. There had been minor hiccups with Audiogalaxy before but nothing quite like that. I saw that my queue was deleted and pretty quickly found news of the settlement both on the SF-indielist and on MetaFilter. I still haven't seen a mainstream media outlet story on this yet. This is at least as big as the Napster case. After reading more, mostly in the MetaFilter comments, I logged back on to see if everything was indeed blocked. And it was.

Jeff Curtis: Audiogalaxy was the best file-sharing program for me as I mainly search for MP3s of rare and out-of-print music. I was disappointed that I hadn't kept up with the trial and made sure I downloaded like crazy last weekend.

Romane Totale: I didn't, I heard friends complaining about that happening. Their reactions were sadness and disbelief. Mine was more along the lines of "that's what you get for depending on a company, chump." Really, it was just a matter of time.

M: Were you under the impression that Audiogalaxy was more legal than the other file-sharing programs because it blocked songs when asked to by the labels?

S.H.: No. Why else would KaZaa go offshore? Audiogalaxy could've kept things going longer, like Napster did, but they chose to settle (God knows why--maybe there's a backroom deal behind their decision), so there's no judicial ruling regarding opt in vs. opt out.

J.C.: Not really. Is "more legal" like the difference between Italian gray-market CDs and Japanese bootlegs?

R.T.: No. I believe that it was just as legal as the others, but the architecture made it a larger litigation target. Protecting yourself from contributary infringement involves either having total control over your users or no control at all.

M: What are you going to use now that Audiogalaxy doesn't work?

S.H.: Nothing for the moment. I'm on a Mac, and there's no KaZaa for Mac. I could use one of the Gnutella clients, but Gnutella is very hit or miss and not usually worth the time.

J.C.: LimeWire or KaZaaLite, although I hear the latter may be dead, too. Gnutella doesn't have enough of a user base.

R.T.: I've always used the same copy of LimeWire that they put out before the ads and spyware. It's a good Gnutella client. I saw Audiogalaxy as inferior because it lacked the versatility of Gnutella. [LimeWire is] one app/protocol that can be used for general file sharing either locally or globally. [It's] great in a pinch on heterogeneous networks when you don't have time to futz with native file-sharing protocols.

M: How much would you pay to use Audiogalaxy if it charged a fee?

S.H.: Nothing. There's no way they could get a paying user base big enough to develop a library large enough--and thus containing enough lesser-known music--to make it worthwhile for me to use it. Napster was closer to the ideal--there were tons of people on it, therefore, you could find anything. You could browse others' libraries easily, thus finding out about new music [Editor's note: Browsing other users' libraries was actually possible with Audiogalaxy as well]; and, with a single click, [you could] set up multiple downloads. Audiogalaxy's main handicap was its limiting Web interface. Still, the range of what you could find was simply astonishing, and this range is only possible if you have tons of users. Maybe one day, if file-sharing charges were integrated into ISP fees, a pay structure would work. But that's a long way off, and until then, it's absurd to expect people to pay for something that won't offer the range of the free services they've already experienced.