SNOCAP: Commercial Peer-to-Peer

Shawn Fanning, the creator of the original Napster, has now founded a company called SNOCAP. The company, based in San Francisco, has just struck a deal with Universal Music Group, the world’s biggest record label and, interestingly enough, one of the plaintiffs that sued Napster Inc. which led the company to bankruptcy in 2002. Universal has agreed to register its entire catalog with Snocap. Additonally, SNOCAP has cut deals with numerous indie labels and a company called Independent Online Distribution Alliance, which is an aggregator of independent label content for digital distribution. They bring to the table an agreement which includes 75,000 tracks from 500 independent labels to SNOCAP. In March, Sony BMG signs on and will offer their catalog as well. It’s unclear from their website how users will pay for the content provided, but it is interesting to see the P2P model applied for legal downloads. The company plans to launch sometime this year.