ReDigi.com – Resell Digital Music
Leaving aside how successful or not it might turn out to be, ReDigi is the sort of service that gets everybody’s attention for the simple reason that it’s disruptive in itself. In essence, ReDigi provides people with a marketplace in which they can sell any piece of digital music they’ve ever purchased. This means that users of ReDigi can get pre-owned music for half the price, and support the original artists while doing so.
So, ReDigi is not a site for the sharing of copyrighted material but rather a spot where data (IE, music) can be transferred legally. ReDigi verifies all that people are listing on the site has been purchased legally. If it hasn’t, then it can’t be sold there. And ReDigi manages all the items that are posted for sale within the sellers’ music libraries, so that nobody will be able to get away with selling the same song twice.
Startups like this one revive the good old debate of whether digital music can be sold or not since those who have bought it in the first place haven’t really purchased it but rather licensed it. There’s too much grey areas there, and while trying to get to the bottom of it all is an interesting intellectual exercise, it’s also true that startups like ReDigi tend to take the brunt of record companies that always take umbrage at those who come along to blur the lines of something that took them so long to figure out like the Internet. ReDigi has been created prior consultation with law firms in Boston, New York and LA, and it has taken all the steps it could take in order not to break the law. But digital music has still got so many quagmires that I wouldn’t be surprised to see some legal reactions before too long.
