Weedshare

» see weedshare.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Every music company in 2003 was trying to stop you from passing files around. A small Seattle outfit called Shared Media Licensing decided to pay you for it instead. Its format, called Weed, was a wrapper around Microsoft's Windows Media DRM with one change that mattered: the file remembered who had handed it to whom. You could play any Weed track three times for free. On the fourth play the file asked for money, and if you had gotten it from a friend, that friend earned a commission on the sale.

The split was published and unusually generous by the standards of the period. On any sale the artist took 50 percent and Shared Media took 15, leaving 35 percent for whoever had passed the file along. The commission chained three generations deep, so the person who shared it with your friend got paid too, in smaller amounts as the chain got longer. John Beezer, the company's president, had built the thing that the file-sharing wars were supposedly about: a way for copying to make money for the person being copied.

It ran for three and a half years and gathered roughly 10,000 musicians and 100,000 tracks, mostly independent, with Magnatune signing a distribution deal at the end of 2005. Then Microsoft shipped Windows Media Player 11, which tightened its DRM checks and read every Weed file as having been tampered with. The player simply refused to play them. Beezer spent six weeks trying to make the format legible again and could not.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how the file worked ~

Superdistribution was the academic name for it, and Weed was the only consumer product that ever made the idea concrete. The pitch to a musician was that a fan with a copy of your song became a storefront for it at no cost to you, and the pitch to a fan was that recommending music could pay for the next record. Both halves were honest, and both of them ran through a file that only Microsoft's player could open.

In 2003 I was at university in Turkey and buying individual songs was not something anyone around me did. The legitimate stores of the period would not sell to us anyway, and a dollar price per track read very differently against a student's week in Ankara. Weed was aimed at somebody already willing to pay who wanted a reason to feel good about it. That listener existed, just not on my side of the map.

~ the update that ended it ~

The Register carried the story on 5 April 2007. Beezer told them the service would suspend operations the following week and that the company was moving away from Microsoft because of the cost and the frustration. The plan was to come back inside six months on MP3 and OMA DRM 2.0 instead. That never happened, and weedshare.com sat there with a notice on it that said the service was no longer available due to compatibility problems with recently released media players.

The notice ended with the sentence that dates the whole era. It told customers to save the Weed files they had bought onto CD, so they would have permanent copies. A company whose entire business was making digital music portable across the internet signed off by recommending an optical disc.

~ what it predicted ~

Weedshare died in April 2007. Amazon opened its DRM-free MP3 store in September of the same year, and inside two years the major labels had abandoned copy protection on downloads altogether. The referral commission that Weed built into the file itself survived in a different shape, as the affiliate link, which does the same accounting without pretending the file needs a lock on it.

The thing worth remembering is where the fatal dependency was. Shared Media never lost a lawsuit and never ran out of artists. It was destroyed by a routine version bump in somebody else's media player, from a company it had no contract with and no leverage over.

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