Wise Startup Blog

John Beezer, the co-founder of Weedshare, whose company is now on the auction block is giving up some suggestions on how they should have done Weedshare for the potential purchasers, and the ideas he’s floating sound awfully similar to the model we’re building at Grooveshark.

Here’s a sample of his suggestions from p2pnet:

Lesson learned: even benign DRM is a bad idea. All forms of friction must be eliminated for authorized file sharing to work.

In Grooveshark, all files are DRM-free in the highest bit-rate available, the way it should be.

If free plays are supported by advertising, and player vendors build easy payment mechanisms into their players, music can be freely shared, musicians can be paid, and fans would never be prohibited from hearing the music they want when they want. Fans will be willing to step up and pay for music they like because it would make the ads go away (to be replaced by artist photos, lyrics, whatever …), it would express gratitude to the artist, and it could potentially lead to benefits from P2P sharing or organized reselling.

Grooveshark uses plays as a promotional piece that allows fans an opportunity to listen to songs on their terms. Fans can just as easily download songs for free from Limewire to listen to them, so how can you force them into 30 second streams if you want them to PAY to download the track.

For more, see their article @ p2pnet