There’s a buzz around about how to monetize P2P, as the music industry begins to realise that the Pandora’s box of illegal downloading that Napster opened in 2000 is never going to be closed – not even by those nice, reasonable folk at the RIAA. The belief of the new generation is that music is free, and will always be free, and that buying a CD is as alien a habit as buying a music magazine.

So who has the answer to how we monetize the free downloading experience. We7? LaLa? Both are making admirable attempts, but both seem doomed to fail due to lack of content and the fact that nobody likes ads, no matter what they’re attached to.

It’s a given that the industry missed the boat with Napster. If some bigwig had had the foresight to see that Napster was, in fact, exactly what the industry needed at that point to get consumers interested in music again, at a time when the ‘90s boom was already heading for a crash, then we’d all be in a very different situation today.

Napster was genius because a) it offered access to long tail content that had previously been the reserve of bearded old men at record fairs, as well as content – cartoon theme tunes, say – that you just couldn’t get anywhere; and b) it allowed you to discover new music by snooping around other people’s collections (it was this element that gave the Last.fm founders the idea for their music recommendation system).

None of these new-fangled ‘free’ services like We7 or the much-delayed Spiralfrog will be able to provide the solution to the industry’s woes because they’ll never be able to provide that kind of content and filtering. LaLa may come close because they allow users to upload their collections for others to stream – but they will eventually be crushed by licensing fees.

As always, it’s content that’s king (which is why there’s no point in even mentioning iTunes in this debate). What’s missed by the industry in the whole anti-P2P argument is that a large percentage of people downloading tracks for free are aged 30+. It’s not just the kids. I use P2P to get obscure Dylan and Beatles bootlegs, and as I’m searching around I see albums by the likes of the Allman Brothers (!) and Rush (!!) getting downloaded by hundreds of users – there’s a lot of fortysomethings out there looking to replace vinyl copies of the records they loved as teenagers, or grab some out-takes or live sessions or rarities. They’re doing it via P2P because where else are they going to find this stuff?

The only way people are going to be enticed away from P2P to a legal service is if it can offer that kind of content. Digital licensing needs to be completely refigured so that this can happen – and soon.

The Go! Team – Huddle Formation

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