The news that Weedshare has closed its doors isn’t new, evidently, but I just came across it today (more coverage lately for some reason). I remember hearing about it once before, but even I needed a refresher on just what the service was all about, so here you go:

Weedshare was a digital download platform that used “viral” DRM in combination with a multi-level marketing approach to sell content of indie musicians. Musicians could distribute Weedshare files through their own website, official download locations and P2P networks. Users could listen to a file three times before purchasing it.

Interesting idea, I suppose, but choosing to use DRM put the nail in the coffin right from the get-go. Weedshare used Windows Media Audio files, meaning that the music could only be played with software and devices that supported Microsoft’s DRM schemes. Many reports make it sound like Microsoft is responsible for Weedshare’s demise:

Weedshare was smoked by Microsoft, whose latest version of Windows Media Player was incompatible with Weedshare files.

There is no information on the issues and attempts of SML to convert or translate Weedshare files to be compatible with Microsoft’s latest software.

As with all things however, there is another side to the story:

CD Baby was supposedly Weedshare’s largest content provider, with 60.000 titles available at the end of 2004. Still, 15 months later, CD Baby artists had only made a total of 1348 dollars, which means that Weedshare sold less than 3000 songs of the CD Baby catalogue during that time.

Sounds kind of like Weedshare was going nowhere fast and simply blamed its woes on Windows Media Player 11. The lack of mainstream coverage would seem to support this.