Music Industry Unveils Net Sales Tracking Tag
from the seems-useless dept
The music industry is working on an electronic version of the UPC code called the GRid (Global Release Indentifier) to help retailers and service providers track the sales of songs online. They say that this is not designed to be used to track down songs that end up on file sharing networks, but simply to make it easier for companies to sell music online. Of course, some researchers have used similar watermarks to track down songs on file sharing networks, so I wonder if this announcement is just a way to start sneaking watermarks into the system.
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The issue is that some reference number has to be used to track royalties on sold downloads. In the past, they would often just use the UPC of the CD, Album, or cassette, but just at EMusic.com we found that the problem of those UPCs being the same on the download as on the physical good set up a real problem. Add to that the fact that the UPC data space is really small, and the selling of individual songs adds a lot of SKUs and you have a real problem.
This is good news in that the music business is finally trying to solve the actual problems of selling music, not the lawyer percieved problems.
-Gene
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