UPDATE: This service was shut down within two months of launch and all IP that it had offered was re-assimilated by the major record labels.
Aurous…nice name…ish…as you may have heard will look a bit like Spotify, behave a little like Apple Music and will be far more unsinkable than The Pirate Bay. If you liked the original music P2P systems, Napster, Kazaa, Audiogalaxy, Limewire, IRC sharing channels, Usenet binaries, and then Bit Torrents, cos you didn’t want to actually pay for music, then Aurous will be your go to outlet. This site could be the final death knell of a nineteenth century copyright industry that began with sheet music and rolled on through wax cylinders, 78s, 45s, CDs, mp3s and streaming…made billions for a tiny few and left millions of artists and music fans floundering in its wake for decades.
The RIAA, copyright trolls, industry mobsters and all the others will soon be as dust. But, then what of the songwriters and musicians? Well, many of them have already turned to a new 21st model of making a living from their music that might work for some but for most will not, sadly. The industry as we knew it with its sharp, cutting contracts, its years and years of record shop hype, its supposed vinyl revival, it’s “pay-what-you-want” offers, even its cassette reissues(!) will be pretty much gone within a year or two. It may rise Phoenix like into some other manifestation, but its wings will be scorched and it will never fly again.
