Liquid Audio To Put Its Mark On MP3 Music
Another interesting little article about Liquid and MP3 music from SF
Chronicle.
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Benny Evangelista, Chronicle Staff Writer Monday, January 25, 1999
Liquid Audio Inc. wants to put its own stamp on a popular Internet music format called MP3.
The Redwood City company will announce today that it is spearheading a coalition of music and technology companies that will offer record labels and artists a way to put a free digital trademark on music distributed in the MP3 format.
The Genuine Music Mark, an inaudible code embedded in an MP3-compressed song, will not by itself prevent Internet music piracy. But it would give consumers a way to tell whether a song they download from the Internet is legal.
''It gives artists the confidence that their music is marked as their own and gives consumers confidence that music came from the artist and not bootleggers,'' said Liquid Audio chief executive Gerry Kearby.
Liquid Audio will unveil the Genuine Music Coalition at the four-day Midem international music industry conference that began yesterday in Cannes, France.
Liquid Audio is trying to latch onto the grassroots popularity of MP3, a format used to compress, store and play CD-quality music on computer desktops and distribute it over the Internet.
The coalition includes companies that have already jumped on the MP3 bandwagon, such as GoodNoise Corp. of Palo Alto; San Jose's Diamond Multimedia Systems Inc., maker of the Rio portable MP3 player; and independent label Platinum Entertainment Inc.
Liquid Audio has been unsuccessful pushing its proprietary Liquid Tracks technology as the standard for digital music distribution. Liquid Tracks-encoded music can only be played using Liquid Audio software.
Meanwhile, the freely distributed MP3 format has become the de facto standard, with even Microsoft Corp. making its Media Player software MP3 compatible. By some accounts, there are about 20,000 MP3- formatted songs available on the Internet.
And the MP3 standard leaped even farther ahead late last year with the introduction of Diamond's Rio, essentially a Sony Walkman for MP3 tunes. South Korea's Samsung Electronics this month unveiled three new MP3 portable players, called Yepp, that also can record voices and tunes from FM radio stations.
The MP3 songs and portable players worried the world's five biggest record labels enough for them to form an unusual collaboration to control piracy and standardize how music is distributed on the Internet in the future.
Now, Liquid Audio is opening technology used for Liquid Tracks to embrace the MP3 world with a digital ''watermark'' that can be embedded in a song. The watermarks are electronic certificates of authenticity that display the artists' name and copyright information.
The mark can't be copied, but won't prevent songs from being played on any MP3-compatible software.
Although Liquid Audio won't charge for use of the watermark, the company hopes to help grow Internet music distribution to the point where it can generate revenues by selling encrypted songs.
''We see this as another step in the broadening of digital distribution,'' Kearby said. ''It doesn't mean we have abandoned at all the concept of security and rights management.''
But analyst Mark Hardie believes Liquid Audio was finally forced to face the music.
''Nobody was interested in Liquid Tracks,'' said Hardie, senior entertainment industry analyst with Forrester Research of Cambridge, Mass.
Offering a way to add a trademark to MP3 music makes business sense for Liquid Audio, he said.
''The opportunity that Liquid Audio has is to take MP3, which is currently viewed as a rogue format, and bring it into the mainstream as an approved format,'' Hardie said.
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