But will they ever meet over a shining corporate table?
ZDNet Australia put the question to Kazaa CEO Nikki Hemming, to find out her take on monetisation and the suggested broad-based Intellectual Property Use Fee (IPUF) the company's lobbyists are trying so hard to sell to Capitol Hill.
ZDNet: At a recent gathering of the music industry in Sydney Australia, Allen Dixon, the general counsel and executive director of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) said his group was prepared to work with technology providers such as Kazaa despite their tough stance with regards to copyright, in your experience has that willingness been demonstrated?
Nikki Hemming: We'd be delighted to talk to talk to IFPI if they are now seeing the potential and benefits that P2P can deliver, such as a powerful promotional tool and efficient distribution system.
What we have seen to date is that the main exchange between the music industry and P2P publishers has usually been that the music industry has taken legal action against the P2P operators and other new technology companies.
Where deals have been established they are label specific and not industry representative so, to date there is no single online music site that has deals in place across the market.
The goal for all parties should be to move forward with a solution for monetising P2P on an industry-wide basis.
Does the traditional music industry understand online distribution?
I think that the music industry is trying to get its head around how it can deal with a new generation of technology savvy consumers who are able to use a variety of empowering technologies to interact with digital content.
They have demonstrated that they understand the technical mechanics of streams and downloads, but they have not settled on the means to harness the power of P2P as a marketing tool.
I believe that the required shift is not in understanding the technology but in the willingness to step beyond the traditional 'price-per-unit' model of existing distribution, and apply a revenue model that reflects new consumer behaviour and continued technological advances.
If so, how do their models differ from that of Kazaa?
Kazaa's business model differs in every way from the current music industry model. Kazaa publishes a piece of software that is downloaded by users who propagate content amongst each other. The Kazaa software is monetised via advertising dollars.
The current approach by the music industry is that downloads are viewed as an end in themselves, not as primarily promotional for CD sales or a means of building an audience attractive to advertisers.
In their current model, downloads are available only to paying subscribers, limited in number (per month) and effectively "rented" with restrictions. The current sites have limited breadth, depth of selection and labels.
Given that both Kazaa and the music industry are ultimately interested in monetising the industry, how does IPUF differ from the approach put forward by wiredrecords.com in conjunction with its partners MP3.com.au, Sanity and Chaos Music?
Wiredrecords.com appears to be a technology developer used by the respective labels for DRM functionality. It does not seem to have a comprehensive approach to monetising P2P.
IPUF is not just a business model, it is more a policy proposal that hardware, software, consumer electronics and telecomm companies that derive value/benefits from the use of digital content should all contribute to a revenue pool that will be funnelled back to creators/rights holders, in exchange for which a type of compulsory licence for such use would be established. There are already a number of precedents established in radio, pay TV and more recently Web-casting (as per the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act DMCA) for similar models.
