Napster nor the unwieldiness of Gnutella. The program, like so much revolutionizing digital entertainment, was born out of equal parts boredom and curiosity. Over Christmas in 1999, Deep was stuck in his leased office on the lifeless RPI campus. The usual pickings on the RPI ethernet - MP3s, games, girlie pics - had grown depressingly slim now that the students had taken their laptops home for the holidays. Deep and one of his programmers wondered if there was a way to simulate the college network without the presence of all those PCs. They realized that many of the kids were still linked by their Instant Messengers. If there was a way to share files via buddy lists, Deep reckoned, he could recreate, in miniature, the school's computer network. The Aimster concept was born.
Before long, Deep knew he was on to something, but wasn't sure where it led. Then, late last July, a business friend razzed Deep about Napster's success and wondered why Deep wasn't as famous as a certain 19-year-old. That's when Deep decided that his program would distribute music and other content, Napster-like, to AIM users.
Sixty obsessive, sleep-deprived days later, Deep had released two versions of Aimster. Kick-starting the program into life after it is first installed from aimster.com can be more than a little frustrating. But once going, it operates like a rudimentary search engine, poking its way through your buddies' hard drives, provided that they, too, use Aimster. Type in a request, and Aimster returns a matching list of files, which can be music, video, graphic, text or anything else. Double-clicking a file name establishes a peer-to-peer connection and begins the transfer.
By limiting its file sharing to buddy lists, Aimster has carved out a possible - repeat, possible - middle ground in the war between the entertainment industries and the technology adepts. Frank Creighton, the RIAA's senior vice president and director of anti-piracy, says that while Aimster "isn't less harmful or wrong" than using Napster, he allows that "it is more akin to the days when kids would make compilation tapes and trade them with dorm buddies. It's more like a Phish fan saying, 'I made you this tape. Now I want you to go out and buy the album.'"
Kid Aimster
Already, one major record label has given Aimster a whirl. As part of the promotion for the release of Radiohead's fourth album, Kid A, EMI Group (EMI)'s Capitol Records released to Aimster users not songs but Radiohead-branded "skins," which customized Aimster's look and linked to a Radiohead site. Though Deep can claim only a small role in the album's success, the label's tacit endorsement helped put Aimster on the map.
Deep hopes to turn that goodwill into revenue in a number of ways. One ingenious twist on Aimster's attachment to IM is that it piggybacks onto the Web's "stickiest" application - Instant Messaging is constantly open on users' desktops. Part of Aimster's moneymaking potential, therefore, is in acting like a Trojan horse for marketers, spilling ads and promotional opportunities into its window on users' desktops. "There's a lot of potential for ad support for something that's always on," says Scheirer.
Because of this, says Deep, "one of the country's largest music retailers" is looking at taking an equity stake in Aimster. (Sources say the retailer is the giant music chain Trans World Entertainment (TWMC), whose corporate headquarters are a stone's throw from Deep's.) If things go as planned, Deep would develop a plug-in that would turn his service into a rudimentary superdistributor: the retailer would fire promotional messages for various artists to Aimster users, along with embedded links to its online CD store. Aimsterites would then pass along those e-flyers to their buddies and spread the retailer's pitch all over the network. "Viral marketing can be good for music," says Jim Griffin, noted digital-music fortune teller and CEO of Cherry Lane Digital. "It's a lot like radio:
