Introducing robonobo
Hello world!
Today we launched robonobo, the social music streaming and downloading app for Mac, Windows and Linux. robonobo shows you your friends’ music, and lets you play it right there and then. You can read all about the features for robonobo users on our about page, and our forthcoming features for artists and rights holders on our artists page, so we’d like to use this space to tell you about why we launched yet another music app, and what we’re hoping robonobo brings to the table.
Simply put, we couldn’t find the music app that we really wanted to use, so we built it, and robonobo is it. In particular, we felt there were two either/or decisions being forced on Internet music users that weren’t necessary, and we’ve tried to bridge both those divides.
The first problem is streaming vs downloading.
With streaming apps, the music is hosted ‘in the cloud’, and it’s sent down to the user’s computer and played as it comes down. This is very convenient for the user, who often just wants the music to play right now with no hassle, but because the music is not stored on their computer (or if it is, the user is not allowed to access it), they are restricted to playing the music only as the designer of the app says they can.
The flip side is downloading apps. With these, the user downloads a music file to their computer, which is great as they can do what they like with it, like copy it to their other computer, or burn it to CD to play in the car, or back it up. However typically they have to wait for the file to finish downloading before they can play it, and once they’ve downloaded it, they can’t download it again without paying for it again.
We’re trying to get the best of both these worlds. With robonobo, when you play a track, it starts playing right away - but in the background, the music file is downloaded to your computer, for you to use as you like, if you like. Once our purchasing system is live (and we’re hard at work on it), once you’ve purchased a track, you can play it an unlimited number of times on an unlimited number of computers. We don’t believe in forcing you into our business model - we want to give you what you want, and then make our business based on that.
The second problem we’re trying to overcome is piracy vs supporting artists.
No two ways about it - piracy is wrong. Musicians do not typically make enough money to support themselves, even many famous ones, and by not buying the music you like, you are actually hurting yourself because if the artist doesn’t make ends meet, they’ll have to get a different job and they’ll never make that next album (which you would have loved). However, piracy exists, and exists massively. The music piracy infrastructure of the Internet is huge, with millions of songs being swapped every day, and it isn’t going away.
At robonobo we want to give artists tools to make money from piracy. This might sound impossible, but here’s how we’re going to do it: the app will create a ‘music fingerprint’ of each track that gets shared, which allows us to spot the same track when it’s encoded in different formats and bitrates. We’ll compare the fingerprint to our database of copyrighted tracks, and if it’s in there, the app won’t share the track - instead, users will see a demo version of the legal track, with an option to buy it (after trying it), super-simply and without ever leaving the app.
This serves two purposes: firstly, it protects users from accidentally sharing copyrighted music over the Internet, so you’ll be able to drag your whole ‘Music’ folder into robonobo without worrying about which files are legal to share and which aren’t. Secondly, it uses any pirated tracks as selling opportunities for the artist, because when the user shares those pirated tracks with their friends, those friends will be able to demo and buy the tracks right there and then. Additionally, many people use piracy to try out new music for free before purchasing the tracks they love. Several studies have shown that pirates buy more music. At robonobo we want to stop telling pirates off, and instead offer them convenient and useful ways to support the artists whose music they love.
We believe in openness throughout. robonobo is fully open source, with a plugin architecture, and we’re committed to interfacing with as many other systems as we can.
We’re just getting started. We’re hard at work getting our artist infrastructure up and running, and in the meanwhile we’re running an open alpha test to kick the tires of our network and get feedback from users. We’d love to hear from you!
