I’ve been waiting for this one. Bram Cohen is the Chief Scientist and co-founder of the P2P file sharing service BitTorrent. And he may also be one of the guys most responsible for the decline in the music industry. So I asked Bram, when we sat down together earlier this week at SFMusicTech, whether he did indeed have any responsibility for killing the music business.
His denial was categorical. Not only did Bram deny any role in shrinking the sale of recorded music, but he actually disputed that the music industry is in decline, claiming “data” showed it to be in a quite healthy state. And Bram had a clear message for music executives who might dispute his argument. “Embrace the future,” he told them, and accept that the product is the band rather than the recording.
This is the second in a series of interviews from SFMusicTech. Yesterday, I posted my conversation with Grateful Dead guitarist and singer Bob Weir, who explained to me why MP3 music is an assault on all our ears.
Bram Cohen is the Chief Scientist and co-founder of BitTorrent, Inc. and the creator of the BitTorrent peer-to-peer (P2P) file distribution protocol. Bram is also the co-founder of CodeCon and the co-author of Codeville. Prior to the creation of BitTorrent, Bram worked at MojoNation. MojoNation allowed people to break up confidential files into encrypted chunks and distribute those pieces to other computers running MojoNations software. This concept served as the inspiration for Bram’s development of BitTorrent. Before MojoNation, Bram...
BitTorrent creates advanced, innovative technologies to efficiently move large files across the Internet. The company’s two main products today include the original BitTorrent software and the tiny-but-mighty µTorrent, which combined boast over 150+ million users. BitTorrent is based in San Francisco, Calif. and is backed by Accel Partners and DCM. BitTorrent is a globally-recognized creator of software and technology designed to help help people find, share and move digital media over the Internet. The company has built an orchestrated ecosystem...
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