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"The owner of 'all you can eat' streaming music platform Boinc has shut down before the service even had the chance to launch.
Boinc's business model would have seen Beyond Oblivion pay 70% of annual revenues to rights holders - and even pay out a royalty fee when identifiable illegal downloadeds were ripped to the service.
Boinc would not have required any paid-for subscription from consumers, but Beyond Oblivion would have taken revenues from the sale of devices onto which it was pre-loaded, including PCs and smartphones."
http://www.musicweek.com/story.asp?sectioncode=1&storycode=1047967&c=1
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/32af873c-3335-11e1-8e0d-00144feabdc0.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/jan/04/music-service-beyond-oblivion-folds
Copyright And Technology Commentary
http://copyrightandtechnology.com/2012/01/02/oblivion-but-not-beyond/
"I want to talk about the company's vision and business model, which - if it had seen the commercial light of day - did in fact have the potential to change the online music industry for the better."
"At a basic level, Beyond's model was a hybrid between download services like iTunes and streaming services like Spotify. It was based on the concepts of licensed devices and play count reporting. Users could buy new Beyond-licensed devices or purchase licenses for their existing PC's or other devices. They could download tracks from the Beyond catalog to their licensed devices (a la iTunes) and listen to them as often as they wanted. The Beyond client software would securely count plays and report them for royalty purposes (a la Spotify).
Users could also add their own music files to their Beyond libraries using a process that is now called "scan and match". Beyond would report plays of those files too, even if the original files were obtained illegally. We had also designed a way for users to add music to Beyond's music catalog (we
called it "catalog crowdsourcing", with permission of rights holders, which could have resulted in the world"s largest legal online music catalog.
There would be no limit to the number of tracks a user could download to a licensed device. Furthermore, Beyond users could freely share their files with other Beyond users; a Beyond file could play on any Beyond-licensed device (within a given country).
Beyond Oblivion had two signed major-label deals with others in the works, and over seven million tracks in its catalog at last count.
Now here's the real differentiator: users would pay neither monthly subscription fees nor per-download charges for the service. Beyond's business model was to charge device makers or network operators the license fees, with the expectation that they would subsidize these fees or perhaps bundle part of them into users' monthly network charges. If users wanted to add Beyond to their own devices, they would pay a one-time charge, expected to be well under US $100, for unlimited downloads for as long as they owned the device."