Swapping Clock Cycles for Free Music?

droopus writes "USA Today is reporting on an innovative business model for the music business. Free music for your spare CPU cycles. Honest Thief says the firm has developed software, to be available in the second quarter of this year, that will enable file-sharing providers to capitalize on the unused CPU cycles of their members. That in turn would allow them to raise money to compensate artists for the use of their material. Honest Thief said the software, known as ThankYou 2.0, enables a peer-to-peer file-sharing client to turn the computers of digital music fans into nodes in a distributed net. By leasing out the processor power on distributed nets to research facilities the firm could generate revenues that would be distributed back to the musicians. Some very smart people have suggested this before, but this seems like the first real implementation. "

Great Idea

[Camel Pilot]

Since the folks who download music are more likely to "borrow" that cd of Office it would make sense that the first few CPU cycles used will be to send MS or other software supplier a list of all unregistered software on your system. This idea really does work.

wow

[playagame]

It sounds really great but it begs the question how much free music for how much cpu power and then what is the point if you are going to download other illegal music anyway, well I guess you may be able to find something in 192kbs that wasn't on kazaa.

But .....?

[rudy_wayne]

Aren't the vast majority of people still on 56k dial-up connections? Is it really possible to do "distributed computing" using computers that are constantly being turned on and off at irregular and unpredictable intervals?

Like paying airline mechanics with free car washes

[writertype]

I confess I don't understand the business model here. It seems like Honest Thief is offering to pay record companies from the proceeds from an arguably untested business model, which would generate an unknown amount of money that would be divided among an unknown number of people in an unknown number of ways.

It seems to make more sense to offer the CPU cycles directly to sound production studios for post-production audio, to transform tomorrow's raspy-voiced bimbo into the sultry songbird that studios want and crave.

Just the 2003 version of an ad-driven "free" ISP service, I'm afraid.

Concerns...

[TWX_the_Linux_Zealot]

As a business model, I could come to respect this as a method, but I do have some concerns:

• Nature of data processing - I'd for one like to know what they'd want to use my computer for. It's pretty clear what Distributed.net and Seti@home do, but businesses often don't have the best interests of consumers in mind, so this would be important.
  
  
• Compensation - I'd like to know how they'd compensate me for the CPU time. Operating computers isn't free, and the electricity costs of running the machine (especially in a desert like Phoenix) could outweigh the benefit, to where it would be cheaper for us to go get CDs. Also, are they compensating us by the packet, giving us a certain download limit, or is simply being connected enough?
  
  
• Malicious Users - If they are compensating by giving access based on how much data return or CPU time spent, I'd next be worried that they wouldn't do an adequate job enforcing proper use. Remember, Seti@home is plagued by individuals faking packet processing, simply to increase their stats artificially, and they're not even being compensated for their troubles. Additionally, the possibility of abuse, like some high school student running the process on the 30 computers in his or her lab exists, and that would cause all kinds of abuse of equipment problems, that could leave the school district with the feeling that the abuse was committed by the company who made the software, rather than simply by the student.
  

Barring these concerns, I would see this as possibly viable...

Re:Uh, riiiight.

[Dutchmaan]

I may be wrong about this but didn't SETI's funding get cut BECAUSE they were getting so many free CPU cycles from their application.

Research Firm revenue != artist revenue

[visionsofmcskill]

clock cycles from a computer are worth Cents on the day.... hell we leave our comp on all day and it costs us jack-nothing almost.

You can sell that distributed power to firms and even they are going to realize how much the true cost/value of such a net is.

which in turn is going to make the value of selling such power go down... the revenue from even selling 80% of Kazzaa's distributed computing wouldn't match the "lost" sales of even just the TOP 40 artists or so "traded" on the P2P network. Much less the huge amount of other artists who become .... traded....

the real solution is to stay ahead of the RIAA , MPAA, DRM, and paladium/itanium by cracking their shit quickly until the media industry is forced to re-shape itself into a more communal buisness model which would award the artists more and promote the local talent more.

-- enter the sig --

Solution.

[Anonymous Coward]

Stick a 30 second ad in front of every song distributed, so music becomes like tv.

Producers can charge advertisers per download of the song they advertise on, kinda like they charge by ratings of the show the commercial interupts.

How much is a SuperBowl commercial nowadays?

Most likely a Britney Spears hit would be worth quite a bit to advertise on...

Just my lame opinion...

Good Idea: This is how the RIAA Will See it:

[Gefiltefish11]

Geek perspective: If you let me dl your music (something I want), I'll let you have my unused cycles (something that is surely valuable).

Evaluation: Fair trade

RIAA perspective: You want to drive to my house, take my stuff, and drive away. In exchange for me allowing you to rob me blind (yes, this is the way the RIAA thinks, despite absence of evidence), you're offering to let me borrow your shitty old car while you're not using it??

Evaluation: You're still a god damned thief, geek boy. Go to hell!

Great for all us guilty musicians

[drblunt]

This sounds like a great option for all us musicians who download other peoples tunes and feel guilty about it...but don't stop. I wouldn't mind doing this at all with the provision that spyware not be included...and that I could control exactley what it looked at. (No! Don't report that copy of Sound Forge! Damn!)

-Doc

I have to ask...

[Salden]

Since the article is slashdotted, is there some ratio of operations performed to bits downloaded? Would people with faster CPUs be able to download more music?

Not viable

[acidrain69]

I highly doubt this will be a viable revenue stream for the music industries. Think about how much they get for an average CD as far as profit goes. Now compare that to your average MP3 downloader. Computer processing power is cheap. If your average person downloads an album a month (a SEVERELY conservative estimate) that is a $15-20 album that isn't sold. Over the course of a year, you are seeing $180-$240 given out in free downloads (that is the album cost @ 1 album/month). You may as well just BUY a board and chip and case for that price and network it locally. You can get a middle of the road AMD or Intel processor and board for that cost, and possibly fit in the case cost. If it has onboard lan, just pop some memory in and you're good to go. Use network booting, maybe a MOSIX cluster or something.

Don't forget to add in the salaries of all the people who have to run this "P2P for cycles" system. Development costs. Administration. Those are people that could just be running the purchased cluster, instead of trying to milk P2P somehow. I think this is just a shot in the dark. Or a conspiracy to fingerprint downloads, as someone else mentioned.

Re:Solution.

[YrWrstNtmr]

www.freeaudiobooks.com tried this with spoken word books in mp3 format.
Free audiobooks, with ads embedded in the first 15 seconds or so.

Recently, they had to change their model to one of buying all but the lowest bitrate quality mp3's.
Maybe poor advertising, maybe poor ad sales, but I think in all the books I got from them (50-75?), I heard maybe one ad that was not 'internal.

Re:plain and simple

[odyrithm]

to add, just look at how well seti@home used spare cpu cycles and then tell me its not worth it.

Re:Your processors aren't worth as much as you thi

[erixtark]

Yeah, but there are currently 40 million users online on Kazaa ae I'm writing this. Now, 40 million times a couple of GHz per user distributed all over the net do add up to a couple of clock cycles that ILM could use to create Jar Jar Binks' grand children in Star Wars VII or whatever they like.

Plus, they can buy it on demand when they need it and don't have to invest in hardware that gets useless after a couple of months.

Maybe the "Killer App?"

[mojotooth]

Assuming a business model like the following, which may or may not closely resemble this 'Thank You' software:

- User runs a distributed computing app on his computer, accumulating credits of some kind on a per work-unit basis.

- User can cash in his work-unit credits for merchandise, music, software, whatever.

This could have interesting impact on the whole "how much CPU power is too much" question. Suddenly there are more reasons than just bragging rights to have the fastest CPU on the block. I wonder if Intel or AMD would start to encourage this kind of thing.

nonsence thinking

[peluche23]

I guess I like the idea, but how much money will my dual Pentium computer at home will be making a year for the artists? Would they keep stats that tells you how much your PC made in profit for the music companies? That would be interesting, thinking of all my friends with either DSL or Cable Modems at home thart leave their computer on 24/7. So if you work 8 hours a day and sleep about 4, that 12 hours your PC would be working for them.

Oh well, move along everyone ..

[apankrat]

:Some very smart people have suggested this before, but this seems like the first real implementation.

One dont need to be smart to proclaim the benefits of using idle PC time for the distributed computing. Quite [parabon.com] a [uniteddevices.com] few [entropia.com] companies [appliedmeta.com] are already doing just that.

It's now purely the issue of effective marketing and sales, not the technology. And grabbing CPU cycles to compensate musicians is just another business plan, certainly neat in idea, but not exactly novel.

Cut out the RIAA

[gad_zuki!]

>I'd rather spend some hard cash buying music online or in the local record store

Me too. Its somewhat hypocritical to condemn the RIAA and keep sucking the top 40 teat. There are plenty of indie bands out there which not only sound great (of course music taste is subjective), but also sell CDs for 10 dollars and throw eight dollar concerts. Its not like its hard to find lots [epitonic.com] of indie music [google.com].

I'm getting tired of hearing how we can appease the RIAA. They don't want a truce, they want you to buy their shiny CDs at 16 bucks a pop, listen to their radio stations and commercials, and go see their overpriced shows plus play the ticketmaster tax.

Capitalism is supposed to decentralize power, the RIAA is as centralized as you can get. Cut them out, ignore their products, and give your money to other markets.

Even if selling cycles was 10x more profitable, they still wouldn't got for it. Maintaining the current system is much more profitable and they're already commited to DRM and already told MP3 traders to piss off.

Sure

[pla]

did u consider the ethical part of the thing

I don't suggest anything even remotely resembling "stealing" the music (if one can even do such a thing, I still haven't decided that myself) - I don't mean downloading MP3s, or swapping with friends, or anything of the sort.

Turn on a radio. What do you hear? Music! Coming to you FOR FREE. Your radio doesn't give the station spare CPU cycles, it doesn't "force" you to listen to commercials, it doesn't even collect demographic info.

My point centers around that. So many companies seem to have this idea that the internet counts as this amazing new medium that needs totally different laws and pricing schemes. That simply does not hold true. Internet radio doesn't need to differ AT ALL from broadcast radio. But folks keep saying some difference has to exist, and we keep swallowing it up.

Until the RIAA gets its act in gear, I'll keep listening to Canadian and European internet stations; buying indie music that doesn't pay for lawyers to fight against what I believe in; and giving a great big finger to corporate America that believes it knows what I want and how I'll pay for it more than I do.

Just in the really unlikely chance someone in the afforementioned group reads this... You know what I want? Choice. I would pay perhaps $10/CD (twice what I spend per indie CD) to choose the exact contents of such a CD, shipped physically to my door (not some sub-quality DRM'd format that expires when I miss my monthly music-library-extortion). I want real music to choose from, not a canned boy-band or slut-soloist of the week to repackage the same drum-machine-with-bad-lyrics songs over and over. I want variety. I want artists who get paid for their work, not artists who need to sue their labels to get what their contract promises them. I want the right to rip music to my computer in the format of my choice (which I theoretically have, except for increasing technical difficulties thanks to "broken" CDs, which I keep returning but the companies keep making anyway).


peronally i have no ethics and shouldnt be talkin, but maybe some may think it is the right thing to do.

I do have ethics. I don't want to screw anyone out of their work. However, those ethics include the idea that the people actually doing the work should get my money, not lawyers, suits, and PR folks so far behind the times they think people will pay more for less just because they redefine the words "better", "cheaper", and "choice".

Perhaps you really do have no qualms about downloading music with no compensation for their work. I can't tell you that. I do, however, believe that most people who "illegally" download MP3s don't do so out of lack of ethics, but out of lack of choice. If music cost a realistic price (of which more than a pittance went to the artist); if 99% of it didn't completely suck; if music stores actually offered choices rather than prepackaged sets of one or two listenable songs and fourteen tracks that make dogs howl; then I think we'd see a lot more "honest" people buying music rather than "stealing" it.

In the mean time, the RIAA has reached the end of its life. I fully expect it to collapse worse than the video game insdustry 25 years ago, or the comic industry did a decade ago, in the next few years. And you can bet I won't mourn its passing as I did either of those previous two. I see its pathetic attempts to squash any form of music on the internet as no better than SCO's attempts to report one last quarter's profit for a dying product.

Good riddance.

Obvious Comment

[philipkd]

Okay, if this is truly expected to work, it begs the question why hasn't its nonexistent ancestor ever worked? Why isn't there a business model where I can just get paid for my spare CPU cycles. Why give the money to the muscians. Just give it to me.

Because such a thing hasn't been made by our uber-fast progress of dot-com creation, then most likely, it doesn't work.

Suicide is the true mark of an advanced civilization - philipd

Re:Are you thinking what I'm thinking?

[firewrought]

trojan horse?

It's called a sandbox. Assuming you trust HonestThief, they can write their software such that it safely execute the code of their clients. This approach can cut down on effective CPU throughput (think: Java) if it's not done right.

Note that access to most resources (printer, screen, network, etc.) isn't necessary for the computations that HonestThief's client's code would be doing. They might provide a disk cache of some sort, or even an API to pass messages back out to the network to other processing nodes. I dunno.

Of course, even trusting that HonestThief does write the daemon with an eye towards security and sandboxing, it will be hard for them to get it right on their first try (whether they're pre-verifying the opcodes or using a full blown java-esque approach).

However, this doesn't really matter in the end: big clients spending lots of money on processing power have better things to do than to write virii for which they will go to jail. The biggest danger would be from criminals who subvert the program (prehaps by masquerading as HonestThief.com?).

What qualifies as "enough" free cycles?

[Anonymous Coward]

Would this program limit downloads based on how much it can execute in the processor's spare time? Is there some sort of quota on downloads, or are you granted unlimited downloads for any free cycles it can get? I'd be interested in that stuff before I sign anything.