|
|
Making it happen
Serving large files uses a lot of bandwidth.
An album's worth of mp3s is about 50MB.
For ten thousand downloads, the bandwidth is 500GB.
Suppose a site has a bandwidth limit of 20GB/month. A typical rate for excess bandwidth is £2
per GB. So the excess cost for ten thousand album downloads in one month is £960.
If you're selling Free Music CDs from the website, let's suppose you sell one CD for every two hundred
downloads. For ten thousand downloads, you sell fifty CDs in a month. You have to pay nearly £1000 to
get those sales. That's £20 subsidy per CD.
This is why Free Music hasn't been done before.
Solutions
There are a number of solutions to this problem. An organisation that has seeded many developments is the
Internet Archive.
The Internet Archive is a project originally established to chronologically record everything
on the Internet. As the Internet evolves, and websites change, the Archive trawls the web, taking snapshots of
websites at various times. At the Internet Archive site, there is a "time machine" that
enables you to choose a website and go back in time to view it as it was.
The Internet Archive time machine is
here.
An Internet Archive project useful for Free Music is
Open Source Audio.
This provides musicians with an audio archive into which recordings can be placed. The recordings must be
freely copiable, although they do not have to be free for commercial use. Each piece of music is
given its own URL, and can be linked to from outside the site.
Open Source Audio is closely associated with the
Creative Commons project.
Coral
The second project useful for Free Music is
Coral, an open peer-to-peer content distribution network.
To use Coral, you link a music file by appending .nyud.net:8090 to the hostname of the file's
URL, for example:
http://www.myfreemusic.org.fr/mp3/firefly.mp3
becomes:
http://www.myfreemusic.org.fr.nyud.net:8090/mp3/firefly.mp3
Clicking on a link with the embedded Coral address causes a Coral cache
to download the file from its original location, while transferring it
to a browser. Thereafter, further accesses by the same or other browsers
result in transfers from the Coral cache, thereby reducing the data load
on the originating site. Volunteer sites host the Coral cache nodes.
See the
Coral website
for further details.
|
|
