Cringley’s Snapster 2.0

A follow-up to the idea of sharing ownership of music. Cringley’s new take is to make sure only a single copy of a CD is in use at any point in time:

Every time a shareholder wants to download or play a song, he or she must ensure that their download is matched on a one-for-one basis with a physical CD somewhere in the system.

Given that the MP3.com locker system failed, I believe that this would likely fail as well. The MP3.com system only allowed you to play music from CDs that you personally owned and it got shut down. This lets you play music from anyone’s CDs. It’s a great idea, but would fail for the same reasons that MP3.com did.