When I founded IUMA in 1993, what we were hoping to accomplish was a proof of concept that high fidelity digital distribution of music was a possibility. What's shocking to everyone is that, perhaps because of the negligence on the part of the music industry, we have a no-compensation model eclipsing both the industry's efforts and Internet artists' successes. This works tremendously well for magazines, for cable, and for telephone services. In all those spaces, there are high market entrance costs and high switching costs, which is where my suspicion lies. The platform I'm talking about, and where Kick comes in, is where a user has a profile, and can leverage that profile to represent his or her interests to get the information that he or she wants.
People can then connect with communities of people who have similar music interests.
The people with whom the user is going to interact are that much better matched to them. This wasn't even able to happen really except in exploratory form until the music was actually there on the desktop. Jim Welte is a reporter for Business2.0 Online.