Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing

Google music search 8 years late

Eight years ago Nick Whyte and our team at AltaVista invented multi-media search. We were the first with Image (picture) Search, Video Search, and Music Search. Seven years ago I joined the team at Napster where we invented P2P music search and file sharing. Pioneers sometimes win fame, but rarely earn fortunes. In this case, the not so fast "fast follower" Google will probably make the fortune.

C/Net broke the story Google whistles a new tune. Funny, I went to Google this morning and couldn't find it. It only shows up as a secondary option after returning results of a search. For example, if you enter "Vanessa Williams" in the regular search box Google will return a results page as usual. One of the first results will have a link that says "More music results for Vanessa Williams". This link spawns a new page with music related results and a new "Search Music" button.

All that multi-media search technology we developed at AltaVista is now the property of Yahoo. Yahoo acquired AltaVista several years ago and many of the brilliant AV engineers are still there. In fact, the Image, Video, and Music search technology is still working on the Yahoo site today.

Incidentally, Nick Whyte now works with the MSN Search group at Microsoft. MSN Search already has Image Search and could add Music Search at anytime. Gee, could Video Search be next?

Both AltaVista and Napster were ahead of their time. The technology was great but the business model hadn't developed and the market wasn't quite ready. In both cases there were several strategic decision blunders as well. I wrote blog articles on my time at AltaVista and Napster that detail the story and lessons learned.

Maybe Google isn't 8 years late...maybe AltaVista was 8 years early. We had the technology at AltaVista and we tried to make ecommerce deals with Amazon and CDNow for music, and Corbis and Getty Images for Images, but we were just too early for the market. Eight years later, maybe the time is right.

Will Snocap make music sampling work?

The New York Times has another interesting article today "Putting the Napster Genie Back in the Bottle". The story is about Shawn Fanning's new company Snocap. You might remember that Shawn was the creative genius behind Napster. Snocap is almost the antithesis of Napster.

Snocap technology creates a "digital fingerprint" of every song file it finds on the Internet. It does this by analyzing the song file as a binary file of ones and zeros and comparing them to other known files. It doesn't matter how the file name is changed, or if the file was shortened, the Snocap technology can uncover copyrighted material and either block it from download, or charge the user a fee agreed to by the copyright owners. Music owners can go to Snocap to "claim" their music and decide if they want to block it, or establish terms for sale. But for this to work, the P2P networks must also agree to employ the Snocap technology, and so far only one file sharing service has signed up.

The technology works but making it a business success will be very difficult. Jonathan Spalter, former CEO of Snocap says "They have a shot, but it's a nine-bank billiard shot and they have only one stroke of the cue to get it right," Mr. Spalter said. "You need to get consensus from a firmament of major labels, independent labels, the publishers, courts, legislature, the peer-to-peer to companies, retailers and other actors. This is the ultimate, purest form of herding cats."

The article quotes Wayne Rosso,  CEO of Mashboxx. "Mr. Rosso says that this tests the theory that people use peer-to-peer, or P2P, file-sharing networks to try out songs, and that they will pay for music they like. "It is the great hypocrisy leveler," he said. "We will see if people use P2P to sample music or not."

When I was at Napster I proposed the idea of a free sampling service and a paid subscription service. The idea was that the free file sharing service would share low bit rate and therefore lower sound quality songs for sampling. We would block the transfer of high quality, high bit rate files. If the user liked the "free sample" song and wanted to own a high quality version, complete with liner notes, lyrics, and cover art, they could purchase it from Napster. The Snocap technology will allow the concept to be tested, and see if consumers will make it commercially viable.

I wrote an earlier post "Napster - the inside story". It is sad to remember this all could have been avoided. "We made one last effort to convince the labels that they should do a deal with us. A little known underground product called Gnutella had just surfaced. It was a P2P file sharing program that required no central server and no company to operate it. Gnutella was an open source program and we were already seeing new variants of it emerge. We told the record labels that we (Napster) had a loyal audience of over 50M users. We had servers that could control distribution. If they didn’t do a deal with us and put us out of business then Gnutella and its derivatives would become unstoppable. There would be no company to sue and no server to shut down. If we worked together now we could convert the market to a paying subscription or per download model. If we didn’t do a deal chaos would ensue. They didn’t believe us and didn’t really understand what this Gnutella threat was. "

We are still in the very early stages of the digital music era. There will be new technology and new business models in the future that will effective capitalize on the enormous market for music.