File-Cash indie music service to debut June 1

A new music file sharing service called File-Cash will launch June 1. It will purportedly offer a catalog of music from over 100 independent labels. And it will be Mac compatible since “for consumers and content providers, the interface is cross-platform,” Mario Almonte of File-Cash told MacCentral.

File-Cash will utilize the E-C Logix E-Cash digital cash technology for payments. What’s more the company claims it will offer “financial incentives” for consumers to download registered files and co-host the files on their home computers’ shared directories.

“For many years, the music industry has been struggling to compete against the increasing popularity of illegal file-sharing on peer-to-peer networks, which cuts significantly into the industry’s legitimate revenues,” said Bernie McGinn, president and co-founder of File-Cash. “Our answer is not to fight peer-to-peer (P2P) networking, but to embrace it.”

According to McGinn, copyright owners register their music into the File-Cash network via a Web-based control panel. They enter relevant artist and file information, search keywords, as well as set the price of the digital file. All files hosted on File-Cash will be encrypted with Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology.

You don’t need a subscription service to use File-Cash. You install a cross-platform application provided by the company to find and download files. Additionally, consumers will get a percentage of the file price every time another consumer downloads the file from their shared drive, according to McGinn. There are no obligations to share files, though file usage will be “governed by the criteria placed upon them by the individual copyright owners,” he added.

The File-Cash protocol lets artists, distributors, record labels, and other digital content providers of any size to register as many or as few files as they wish “without any risk or obligation.” Rights owners can set and change their prices, payments, and usage whenever they wish.

“Since File-Cash provides incentives for consumers to legally download files and keep them on their shared drive, we believe the business model is much stronger than Apple’s, Rhapsody, AOL and all similar subscription services and addresses the reality of piracy on p2p networks in a more realistic, effective way,” Almonte said. “Why? The fact remains that few to none of consumers will pay 99 cents [the price of a song at the iTunes Music Store] to download a file they can get for free — with absolutely no restriction on usage — off the many p2p networks operating today. But if you paid them to download the file legally, that becomes a totally different story.”