Music is a precious thing. A universal form of communication and a source of enjoyment for millions, music is a resource that all can love. However, what happens when someone intends to steal that resource? If you were born during the internet age, you’re familiar with the music industry’s battle against file-sharing and illegal downloading. After that last battle with Spotify recently came to a close, another contender for the crosshairs has announced their entrance to the file-sharing game.
Aurous, recently announced and already a target for lawsuits, has its work cut out if it hopes to survive. A $150,000 fine levied at the young company looks to stop the sharing before it can begin. Next in a long line of dubious downloading websites, Aurous is equal parts Popcorn Time and BitTorrent.
Aurous is still young in its development lifespan, but it may never get to spread its wings if these lawsuits are successful. Designed to be competition for the litany of music-based listening apps, questions abound if Aurous is necessary in a world flooded with listening programs.
Many of these questionable services stand on their options to pay, with commercials occasionally to offset the legality of their music library. Like Netflix,
many of these services offer their selection of music for little to nothing when compared to the price of acquiring all the necessary albums. However, Aurous lacks the influence to motivate advertisers into joining them, and their library of songs is gathered from pirated files on Russian websites.
Though still too early to tell, it’s something to see the boom of file-sharing services, and the impact they’ve had on the market. In a time where purchasing content has become a bygone tendency, the free-market has learned many lessons through Napster, Limewire and now Bittorrent. We may see the first preemptive strike in the history of this long and bloody media war, and the target is Aurous.
In recent studies, Neuroscientists have discovered that listening to music has a quantifiable reaction in the human brain. Activating the reward centers of the listener’s brain, music can and will heighten positive emotion, and release dopamine to elevate our emotional levels to that of near elation. Conducting scans of patients’ brains while listening to music also revealed that almost no centers of the brain are immune to music’s touch. It should come as no surprise that culturally, music has been used in tribal rituals as a gathering tool and for healing. The thrumming power of live music has an entrancing effect, connecting whole swaths of people in joy-fueled reverie. Modern medicine, adopting the tricks of ancient tribes, have begun flirting with using music to aid in the recovery of certain procedures.