AUDIO QUALITY BASED CULLING IN A PEER-TO PEER DISTRIBUTION MODEL

Electronic Music Distribution (EMD), wherein music stored as digital files is downloadable by end users from retail computer databases or from Peer to Peer “file sharing” databases such as Napster, has developed rapidly in the recent past as an alternative to the traditional distribution channels for recorded music. While EMD holds great promise as a distribution vehicle, certain limitations exist with regard to the capability of existing distribution models to classify or characterize the audio quality of the files available for download. This limitation is particularly acute in the Peer-to-Peer context where the downloadable database consists of files from a multiplicity of sources. The present invention utilizes an objective measure of audio quality that is, in one embodiment, presented as part of a response to a user or subscriber search query.