Reverb lets music and television fans "bend the rules℠"

We've always had a hypothesis that no one wants to steal content. Finding illegal sources feels geeky and takes a certain hacker mentality. Downloads can be slow and content quality is a crap shoot. But how about the alternatives?

Buying a song for around 99¢ isn't a bad deal, but you need a credit card to do it. There goes a good chunk of the music market – kids in college, high school or younger. They could go to an Apple store or maybe even a Safeway to buy a prepaid iTunes card, but that process kills the spontaneity. And anyone still buying physical media knows all the limitations there – an easily damaged disc that you have to carry with you from the living room to dorm room to car, and then rip onto an iPod or Zune if you want portability.

Hence, our theory that Napster (the O.G. original) wasn't about getting stuff free for most people. It was about a rewarding result to almost any search – you could find almost any song you could think of and download it from a "peer" – and a discovery mechanism that later swept the Internet in the form of Web 2.0 and social media. (Remember how you could look at someone's entire music collection once you found a song from that peer? And remember how often you'd say, "Oooh!" to all the other songs you wanted once you looked at this peer's collection?)

"The Reverb framework gives content owners a way to battle piracy through usability. Content is easy to find and makes money even when it's just shared; not purchased."

Marc Colando, Inventor

The way we think that content owners can re-capture profit, particularly in areas like the music industry that depend on end-user content purchasing, by focusing on usability instead of worrying about piracy. Reverb allows any content to use a "freemium" model. Take or share the content without paying and hear brief, not-too-intrusive advertisements. Acquire the content, either by paying or completing some action that's valuable to the advertiser, and the content can be enjoyed ad free. The content is invisibly tagged with the e-mail address of the original downloader, just like iTunes. And a single file plays with ads by default, and ad free in Reverb-enabled players.

We've posted one of our early Flash® demos on the side of this page for anyone who wants to take a peek. Reverb has been through limited testing with three major record labels in the UK, and a full working prototype is available if you want to get in touch.

Overview: The Reverb framework illustrated

The diagram above is a high-level illustration of the Reverb framework. Additional technical details are available upon request.