Hot on the heels of our blog about Google's rumored digital music venture, news has emerged that LimeWire is also thinking along the same kind of lines. According to an article published by Digital Music News (DMN), LimeWire is looking to the cloud for its survival -- that's before it gets swallowed up in a sea of lawsuits. As you probably know, LimeWire's P2P legal situation at the moment is pretty dire. It has recently lost a copyright infringement case with the RIAA and more music labels are bringing claims against it.
In order to go legit, LimeWire is planning to provide a subscription-based 'ecosystem' to give consumers a multi-faceted environment to enjoy their music collection. Features hinted at include: desktop and mobile apps; Web tools, and the ability to sync iTunes' playlists and music library content to the cloud. It's this last aspect that's most interesting. It potentially opens up a way for you to easily sync your iTunes library content with portable players such as the iPod and iPhone from anywhere. One of LimeWire's executives explained, "Users will have complete and instant access to their entire library and catalog across their desktop, devices, and in the cloud. By syncing iTunes playlists and content to the cloud, users' existing libraries are available to access and stream to a wide range of connected devices."
Recently, we've seen a surge of music services using the buzzword, "Cloud", to try and increase their share of the online music market by providing consumers with a next generation service that is Internet-based. However, considering that LimeWire potentially faces having to pay millions of dollars for copyright infringement, will LimeWire's "post-lawsuit relaunch" ever get off the ground?If it does survive, LimeWire's ecosystem is penciled in for late 2010 according to the DMN report.
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Comments
Sounds like a nebulous cloud to me.
Isn’t LimeWire where we go to get viral infections?