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Music Downloads on the…FREE WTF!!

November 23, 2009

Have you heard of the new Napster, oh wait I guess we should say Napster Clone? No, well we here at Music-Is-Life got your back so we wanted to keep you in the loop! It’s called Vye Music and comes directly from a 16-year Gold Coast kid who is promoting the downloading (can we say theft) of music with his new site. He goes on to say that Vye Music can be described as a “meta-search engine” that allows you to “discover, stream, share and download millions of tracks”.

If we take a look at this website Vye Music, we can see it looks like it’s a rushed attempt to make some quick dough. Do you see all those ads on the side? Personally we looked into what all the hub-bub is about and most articles are talking about it being a Napster or Kazaa Clone and has a very similar business model. BUT NOT SO FAST SHERLOCK, could what this kid (and his backers) actually be doing is racking in the bills from the ads?

Kazaa and Napster back in the day were made to share music. They believed in the concept of a free space where people could share music that had been bought with others with similar tastes. Their business model wasn’t to rake in the cash through millions of webpage ads. Napster even went so far as to fight in court for the free sharing of music. Of course they lost, as we all remember. What Vye is appearing to do though is not develop a community of sharing music. It looks like they know that the courts will chase them down. Come on!! how could they do a website that is so similar to ones that were already shut down unless their motives are something different?!

We think that Vye Music is cashing in while they can on a promising concept from our pasts. Not working for the artist, nor for the music community as a whole but milking everyone that believes in the united world of sound. Shame on them.

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Published in >> Music News, WTF

Conversely, we believe very strongly in a very similar vision to that which Napster had. The need for music to be free for all to share and enjoy is, in fact, not a mantra to aid us in making a quick buck; rather, a core vision and value that will hopefully one day become a reality.

Our vision is only SIMILAR to Napster in that single aspect, however, because Napster ignored one crucial element: the work that goes into producing music. We understand that producers, artists, labels, sound engineers, writers, executives and countless other individuals work tirelessly to create music experiences for people.

We believe we have a solution for the growing rift between music producers and music fans. Imagine for a moment a single distribution platform for music; the 10 billion songs that are downloaded yearly across torrents, websites, distributed by friends, and bought digitally, would all run through this single interface online. Not only that but, music reviews, featured artists, spotlight sections, collaborative playlists and ever-growing music libraries with built-in-chat (streams), as well as new tools for artist discovery, would create billions of pageviews yearly. Advertising revenues from these pages would quite summarily match, perhaps even better, the current revenues that are earned by record labels (over 5bn USD).

And that’s what we envision, ultimately:
A VYEable (excuse the pun) method for free music distribution. In our vision, people can enjoy music without fear, the record labels are not the hated archetypes of corporate music, but the valued producers and distributors of the music that we love.

In the meantime, however, before the release of VyeX, which will have greater support for music discovery, playlists, artist channels and such, we have the Featured Music section on Vye–a page that will soon begin to feature individual artists, unsigned bands, and smaller label musicians in an effort to aid in music discovery.