According to Eric Garland of BigChampagne, two billion songs are traded monthly on peer-to-peer services. It seems that all the record industry's efforts at clamping down on this activity with lawsuits and spoofing has not significantly slowed the traffic.

But in a recent article in Wired magazine called "Toe-to-Toe Over Peer-to-Peer", there are signs that the industry may finally be taking a new tack in regard to this powerful new way of distributing music.

Michael Grebb reports that "Amid the recent collapse of talks over the Induce Act in Congress, record labels are closing in on deals to enable several new peer-to-peer services to emerge -- with the sanction of major record labels that have so far derided P2P as a haven for piracy. At least one record industry representative predicted that such sanctioned P2P services will start to proliferate in the next several months.”

"We are going to see three or four of these in the very, very near future," said Mitch Glazier, senior vice president of government relations and legislative counsel at the Recording Industry Association of America. Glazier said the new services will be consumer-friendly and enable the portability that digital music consumers demand, all without running afoul of copyright law. "P2P technology is great," Glazier said. "It can be harnessed for good or harnessed for bad."

I asked former President of Grokster, Wayne Rosso, if Glazier's comments signaled a shift in policy on the part of the recording industry towards P2P.

Wayne replied: "Let's face it. The RIAA is losing the battle. They HAVE to start changing their tune. P2P is here. There's no way to kill it off. The challenge is to
legitimize it. And that will take some forward thinking record company
CEO's. Fortunately there is one out there who is progressive and wants
to break the mold and try to create a new marketplace through
leveraging P2P traffic. That day will come very soon.”

In fact, the dynamic already looks to be changing. Continues Rosso, “The future is going to be an amalgamation of several different licensed schemes that each P2P will bet their futures on. But the problem is
that even though the opportunities are starting to arise now and the
record companies are reaching out, many of my colleagues are backing
off, afraid that if they play ball they'll lose their traffic. I happen
to think that after you've been screaming to the high heavens for years
claiming that you want to work with the labels if they would only
license p2p, and when presented with the opportunity many p2p players
then only want the licenses on their terms, is totally dishonest. You
can't change things unless you're in the room with the top guys. You
have to start somewhere. And let's face it: copyright owners deserve to
be paid for their content. I've always maintained that.”