16-yr old launches Vye music-sharing site. Another Napster?

With the help of close friends and family, 16-year-old Charles Allatt, has launched Vye Music, an online meta search app for music files around the Net.

The site pulls search results from other music sites — including Skreemr, MP3Codes, and 4Shared Music, sites which in turn index hundreds of thousands of sites, blogs and artist pages.

Vye collates all of this content for the user and applies a simple, AJAX-based interface to let you build playlists, stream songs, and download them.

Letting users share and download music for free is what got Napster in trouble for copyright violations back in 2001 and led to the end of that free service. But Allatt claims that the distinction between his website and Napster is that his site is legal, despite the download availability. (An inability to download music has been the legal distinction that other sites in the music-sharing space have used to stay out of court. Streaming is considered a broadcast — as in radio — whereas downloading is a product, something that was well-defined during the Napster trials.)

Allatt says that as a search engine, “Vye Music permits users to download the content, operating under the premise that exterior copyright controls (ie. the copyright compliance of our APIs and content hosters) as well as users’ own judgment will let users stay well within the law.”

In other words, Vye doesn’t actually have any direct control over the content that appears on the site. The control is with the ultimate host of the music being streamed or downloaded. Vye merely links to those hosts through a search index. Allatt does say he plans to comply with copyright law: “DMCA takedown notices are forwarded to the relevant API providers, and the direct hosts of content wherever possible.”

It remains to be seen how well Allatt’s legal claims might hold.

The site interface and features are, however, nicely done. You can use the simple, intuitive interface without login, but you’ll need a username if you want to access more advanced sharing and storing features. Supposedly DRM-free music tracks can be downloaded directly from their links as well. I say “supposedly” because a search for Metallica brings up several download-able tunes whose only connection to Metallica is that it was the front band for the RIAA lawsuits that covered the news a couple of years ago.

As with most search tools of this nature, some of what is returned is not what you asked for and, I found, is also often not the full song. Worse yet, songs are often “Rick Rolled” to be something entirely different from their titles. This, of course, is not necessarily Vye’s problem, but it is a problem endemic to search-based apps.

As for potential competitors, the site’s closest competitors are the very same sites it pulls content from.

Allatt, who’s Australian and based on Australia’s Gold Coast, developed and maintains the site under the auspices of his company VEXiS Media. He self-funded the company, and several friends and family members assist him with the site for free.

He previously started failed music site iZaRia.us. It’s possible he’ll have better luck with this newest venture, since there are some indications the music industry may take more kindly to free online downloads than it has in the past.

Many around the Web have been saying that the RIAA lawsuits were a turning point in which the paradigm of artist-label-distributor was broken and shown to be outdated. Some artists, most notably Pearl Jam, have foregone the larger record label almost entirely, pursuing a more open approach. Up-and-coming bands often put free copies of entire albums online for download and dissemination, making money through paying gigs, concerts, and donations. The Isosceles Project in Canada is an example of that model. With the advent of high-speed data connections for most of the modern world, the days of the album and record label may be coming to a close. These new models of music distribution are likely the early versions of the new paradigm. So, perhaps Vye Music is part of those beginnings.

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