AssFace's Journal: An idea...

We know that HP, Coke, iTunes, WalMart (or was it KMart), MusicMatch, etc are trying to do online downloads of songs. You pay $N and then get N songs - instant gratification.

The annoying part is that they are all competing for the same customer base. In the process of this, they approach XYZ record label and make deals to that they can get content to distribute. They also sign exclusivity deals, so that means a song/album/discography by band ABC (just an example, not necessarily the young wunderkind Another Bad Creation) may only be on one service.

Because of this, you have to go to iTunes to get your fix for one band, Napster for another, and then maybe the Coke store for yet another - each having their own interface.

Much in the same way that a few open source P2P clients have combined the background processes of several sharing protocols and server groups, it would seem that it would be possible and/or desirable to do the same for the online music purchasing world.
Or in the way that Proteus on Mac and Trillian on Windows have made a client that can use all of the chat platforms.

You would either have a web page or a client that would keep track of your various user ids, and then you could enter a search in one place, and it would then turn up the hits on the various services that you have a login on.
Then you could see that only iTunes carries XYZ, but 3 of them carry ABC and Napster has the best price.

Sort of like Pricewatch, but for the online music downloads.

The issues would be that they likely use their own proprietary communications protocol - even though in the end it is just queries into databases and links to correlate to those and then end data.

Also, on an unrelated note - I saw an incredibly hot girl at lunch today. Either it was Claire Forlani, or someone that looked exactly like her. Not sure how tall she was (aside from shorter than me), and I couldn't tell if she had a Brit accent or not. Otherwise I would say that it had to be her.
Hot.