Mercora :: Little program has Radio and RIAA against the Ropes
Date: Thursday, November 11 @ 20:19:29 CET
Topic: Software


By. Trajick

Once in awhile, I’ll check out what’s going on around the web, just to see what’s new. Well I came across the name of a new company which seems to be on the verge of slapping up the industry, the name? Mercora! Created by the former co founders of Gnutella 2 peer-to-peer (P2P) Client, and McAfee Antivirus, Mercora is set to now give the RIAA a run with what it’s dubbing P2P Radio. Now I’ve been around the web for a minute, and seen many companies come and go, but I haven’t seen anything like this. There’s been Napster, Morpheus, Kazaa, etc. but where they seemed to miss the mark, as far ass staying power (due to copyright issues), Mercora has watched, learned and has found a small glitch in the Matrix.

Copyrights and Mercora
Ok this is how it goes, where the other P2P companies allowed you to download the music (hence copyright infringement lawsuits), not this time. Mercora a small application, this is how you get setup. It downloads and installs on your computer, allows you to create your user name, scans your hard drive (you can specify an actual folder instead of the scan), looks for all of your music files (Mp3, WMA, Ogg Vorbis), puts them under your “My Library” Tab where you can create your playlist to your very own P2P Radio Station. Yea, thats all it takes to get your station up. There are rules set to how you play music over the net, that keep them in accordance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) hence keeping the RIAA silent for now. They pay the musical composition performance royalties through licenses with ASCAP, BMI and SESAC so you can stream your music collection with no problem. Of course, you have to actually own the cd of the artist on your playlist or this would be a RIAA free for all. The way they keep out of the crosshairs is by:

1.) Regulating what they call Non-Interactive Webcasting (users can’t request music).
2.) Adhering to the "Performance Complement" which imposes restrictions on the number and sequence of songs from any particular artist and album that can be webcast in a three hour period. (You can’t play an artist or album more than 3 to 4 times in 3 hours)
3.) The inability to search for specific tracks
4.) The inability to have the system "automatically" switch broadcast stations looking for a song or artist
5.) Broadcasters (people who have a playlist active) can not let people know what time a certain song plays.

Other than that, it’s pretty easy to get your Station up in running 10 min to an hour. The hour was us setting up a playlist that we actually liked, that could be played regardless how the system picked the songs. We’ve already been online for a few days testing it out and already, we can see this as a great outlet for Independent Artists. We’ve already got our network of artists that we’ll be putting out underneath some of the playlists, as well as, just receiving 10 online artists that what us to push out some of their latest tracks under our playlist. So even if you don’t want to share your collection (as a Broadcaster) and you just want to listen, you may want to check it out. Cuz, you never know how long something like this will last and promotion is promotion regardless of how you get your music out there.

You can find more information Mercora at their website http://www.mercora.com/about.asp.

http://www.soulphoniks.com





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