What does Viacom see in Hype Machine?

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Perhaps someone can help me out with this one.

The Hype Machine is an online music blog aggregator that surfs the web for blogs sharing (for the most part) illegal MP3s. Users then listen to the MP3s, and download them if they wish. It is a portal into a world that major labels tend to look the other way on, a world of sharing copy-written material for free in the name of “promotion.” Not that I’m against it, mind you, it’s a tremendously valuable music discovery tool.

Image via WikipediaViacom is a multinational media conglomerate who’s holdings include Paramount, Dreamworks, MTV, VH1, CMT, and Comedy Central. They have reportedly offered to buy The Hype Machine for $10M.

What is the end-game in this crazy time of media moguls snapping up music sites for insane chunks of change? Where are the profits going to come from? And don’t lay that tired “advertising revenue” smack on me. Does nobody remember the first dotcom boom and subsequent bust? Huge corporations don’t make something cool, they co-opt it, suck the cool out, and serve the reheated leftovers.

Somebody please make this make sense to me - obviously Viacom can’t openly endorse a service that shares (or promotes the sharing of) copy-written material, so in buying it, wouldn’t they have to change it? And if the strategy is to pay $10M for an architecture that you can fill with your own content, it perfectly illustrates the erroneous mindset of the modern music industry. Jesus, spend half that much and MAKE YOUR OWN DAMN THING. You cannot tell me that you couldn’t have a team of programmers whip up a site that aggregates content from multiple other sites for less than 10 million dollars.

Is it the built-in traffic? I’m sure that Hype Machine gets a significant amount of traffic daily, but guess what? Once Viacom strips away what’s there and installs its own ass-backwards system of ad-supported DRM-laden offerings, that glorious traffic they are so enamored of AIN’T COMIN’ BACK. In fact, in this day and age, what will happen is somebody else will build a newer and better site that does what the old Hype Machine did, get all of the traffic that is no longer going to Hype Machine, and then get bought out by Viacom, who were wondering why all of their Hype Machine traffic left.

The spiral that started with Napster is getting tighter and faster. I wish I could offer a solution, friends, but that’s the scariest part… so far, nobody’s got one. I only know that this isn’t it. [ms]