Brian Garrity’s article “From Piracy to Profit” examines how former illegal downloading services as well as new upstart companies are attempting to start up legal downloading services. Garrity begins with talking about a new service called iMesh which is endorsed by the RIAA as a legit music downloading service. Users get a free two month trial period and then pay a $6.95 per month subscription fee after that. Users are also able to trade copyrights not controlled by the major labels for free. He also talks about upstarts like Mashboxx, SpiralFrog and QTrax that have label licensing deals with ad-supported downloads.

Garrity runs through a list of new services along with services that had been shut down by the courts and are now returning with a legal business model. He notes that BitTorent is the first P2P company to sign a deal with a major movie studio when it inked a deal with Warner Bros. Next he talks about Kazaa being shut down and ordered to pay $100 million to the entertainment industry and is now trying to build a legitimate business model and is working on licensing deals with record labels. SpiralFrog allows users to download a file for six months and forces them to watch an ad before downloading each file in order to make money. QTrax allows users to play a file five times before down before moving to its subscription service.

Garrity’s article gives an idea on how downloading services are adapting to the Grokster decision and what the future of digital music is going to be. In the larger context, the success of these joint deals between online downloading services and record companies is also very important to the future of the record industry.