Limewire Music Store Enters Beta

by Jordan Yerman | March 19, 2008 at 06:08 am

193 views | 0 Recommendations | 0 comments

Limewire, that peer-to-peer MP3 freemarket that served as a RIAA dartboard, has launched an online music store in beta. The architecture of such a store would have to be quite different from the spam-infused free-for-all that was its original client interface.
"The first one's always free"- Peg Leg, The Black Rider (Tim Waits, William S. Bourroughs)

A delay is understandable, as the architecture of the service has changed considerably. Not based upon peer-to-peer file transfer, the 256K encoded MP3s -- and even a limited number of the 500K -- are hosted on Limewire servers. Purchase transactions can take place through the Web site in a browser, or through the P2P client's own interface.
Limewire's service saw it's first peak in popularity approximately four years ago, which garnered it a crackdown on file sharing by the RIAA. Last year, reports of its P2P client's relevance were mixed: Digital Music News claimed the service was installed in as many as 36% of PCs, while TorrentFreak claimed Limewire constituted 18% of all P2P clients deployed. (You're invited to try to do the math.)

Though BitTorrent clients have been frequently blamed by ISPs for gluttonous bandwidth consumption, no client has reached an installed base as high as Limewire's P2P.