Bluemusic: A Multichannel Architecture for Music Distribution

Despite the increasing number of e-music downloads and the large use of mobile devices, the mobile music market is slowly taking off. Prices seem to be the main burden: compared to the wired environment, a song is twice or three times more expensive. Furthermore, mobile network transfer data rate causes the download time to be very long. In this paper we propose Bluemusic, a multi channel architecture that couples the usage of the mobile phone network with the free-of-charge communication technologies provided in cellphones (e.g., bluetooth or Wi-Fi) to distribute music in the mobile environment. To protect digital contents, Bluemusic is provided with a security mechanism that prevents illegal contents distribution. An evaluation of our approach shows that Bluemusic can be helpful to the expansion of the mobile music market.