A panel at Canadian Music Week predicted file trading would be a paid experience within a couple of years (read article at the Toronto Star).

The one thing in the article that just jumped out at me was a quote by David Hughes, senior vice-president of the RIAA's technology division. He foresees ISPs offering a subscription-based service ("as much as $12 a month") that will be charged according to bandwidth used. Wow. Sounds to me like an RIAA exec is predicting an ISP fee that will pay content owners. While his statements were not exactly an explicit stamp of approval, that's about the clearest endorsement of a legal P2P model I can recall hearing from the RIAA. What other subscription plan could he have been talking about? The panel was about future and legit P2P models, not ISP pricing strategies.

A system that increased broadband prices for low-bandwidth consumers, said BigChampagne's Eric Garland, was not a good solution. "Maybe the ISPs will have to find the bandwidth hogs and charge them extra," he said.

Gary Greenstein, who specializes in financing in digital media, sees the lack of ads in P2P applications as lost revenue. Users, he said, are "looking at an empty screen waiting for searches and downloads – that's a huge and untapped opportunity for advertisers." Ah, the SpiralFrog approach. I should point out that when I used SpiralFrog I toggled away from that window and did something else while my files downloaded. I assume others have the same ability to multi-task rather than stare at a screen and watch the download's progress.