wax&wires

Used MP3 Store?

Seriously? Bopaboo.com is a website where you can buy and sell USED mp3s. I can see the good intent behind it, and why somebody thought it would work, but it seems pretty ridiculous in practice. Buying and selling works with everything else we own because most things we own are physical items that you can surrender upon sale. Unless Bopaboo has some type of software that searches your hard drive and deletes the file from your computer anytime you sell a song, there’s nothing to stop people from selling their music, yet still retaining a copy of their own. Even if they had said software (which would be a disaster waiting to happen, likely scaring any would-be users away), you could just drop your music on an external and eject it any time the software runs. All that would be IF Bopaboo.com had such software, which they don’t, so it’s a moot point.

So how will this play out? The only way I can see this going is that people will upload their music, retaining a personal copy of it regardless of the site’s intentions, and then download any music available at a discounted rate; essentially making this a discount MP3 store where you can call “dibs” on songs in anybody else’s library, with potentially no loss on their end, all at $0.25 a pop.

Is this a joke, or am I missing something here?

http://www.bopaboo.com/

This entry was posted on Monday, December 8th, 2008 at 11:33 pm. It is filed under wax and tagged with amazonmp3, downloads, itunes, websites. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.