80 Proof Music actually has a few enemies, in two forms: other digital music stores, such as iTunes Music Store and AmazonMP3, and organized forms of music sharing, like BitTorrent and Usenet.  Both forms have significant mindshare and their own sets of strengths and weaknesses, and what 80 Proof Music must do is provide a superior or comparable alternative to them.

Competing with the existing stores is easy.  They dictate format and quality, where we intend to give our customers choices.  Their previews are small clips where we will provide full-length previews.  We’re optimizing for the customer experience, which is not something we feel the other parties do.

Competing with file sharing is more difficult, because free is what it is.  Here we can’t provide a superior product because you can find full-quality copies for free and there’s no beating that.  What we can do is give people the same quality product and give them the option to support the artists too.

We can also provide something missing from torrents and Usenet posts; reliability.  No torrents stalled because there isn’t anyone seeding.  No missing chunks because some of the binary posts didn’t make it through.  I’d like it if we had more advantages over piracy than that, but simply giving people who enjoy the superior aspects of pirated music a legitimate way to collect seems like a good start to me.

80 Proof Music is going to give artists a way to sell to people like Bryan and I, who want to buy music, but don’t want to buy it at reduced quality or on physical media.  Right now the only ones meeting that demand are the torrent seeders and Usenet posters.  I have to hope that the larger vendors remain ignorant (or arrogant?) and continue to give up the potential business, because it can only mean good things for us.