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Maybe it would make more sense to charge per minute of song, or by bandwidth.

http://www.allofmp3.com/ charges by bandwidth, and offers some losslessly encoded CD's, as well as encoding to a large veriety of lossy formats. I've bought 5 albums from them so far, and I've been very impressed :)

http://www.magnatune.com/ also offers losslessly encoded files, and charges on a sliding scale letting you pay between about $5 and $15 per album iirc.

This is what I was waiting for. iTunes and co can go jump in a lake with their silly lossily-encoded DRM-encumbered overpriced music.

They charge just as much (usualy more, in my experience) for their albums and never drop their prices.

I can get FLAC or WAV albums at Magnatune for $5 an album. Disregarding the quality of the band itself or the job done at the studio, that's much higher quality and much lower price than the 128kb AAC for $14 an album at iTunes.

In the past, major labels counted on radio for advertising and the fact that independant recordings were difficult to distribute for the artist and difficult to find for the consumer. In the age of the internet, Blogs build buzz and the sale of the album is a hyperlink away.

My hope is that new, high-quality artists will go to Magnatune and similar labels in the future for a better deal then they get at Sony, BMI, etc. As soon as these new labels start gettting stars then the record companies will find out just how hard it is to keep people buying a crappy product for a high price.

TW

Magnatune experimented with what I would term "tipware". Here, you pay a certain amount in excess of a minimum (like at a restaurant) as opposed to donationware where the minimum is $0. Data is available from this, and it might surprise you.

that's ALL I'll do

or you might go with the music label that is not evil.:

We call it "try before you buy." It's the shareware model applied to music. Listen to hundreds of MP3'd albums from our artists. Or try our genre-based radio stations. If you like what you hear, buy our music online for as little as $5 an album or license our music for commercial use. Artists get a full 50% of the purchase price. And unlike most record labels, our artists keep the rights to their music.

there's always an alternative... or two.

There isn't one site out there that lets me buy music online that works in Linux!!

Yes, there is

Mainstream artists it's not, but it is MP3s and you can stream through XMMS, no problem.

My wife is planning on getting a few albums through them.

Whatever. I can play the songs on my Macs, my Dell and my iPod. I can burn CDs and play it in my car, on my stereo, in my portable CD player. Not very restrictive at all. That works for me.
Great. Sounds like you've found something that is still more restrictive than WMA music, but you're happy with it.

Besides, I can buy MP3s from anywhere else. Oh wait. Who sells those?

http://www.magnatune.com/ for starters.

The SCDC indeed supports an RIAA boycott, but not a general boycott of all CDs. There are many non-evil independent record labels, most notably Magnatune (they are not evil). We're in favor of supporting artists, we just think supporting the RIAA actually hurts artists.

The point is that copyright infringement is a crime, and the recording industry associations have the duty to find and prosecute those who commit it. (emphasis mine)

Why? The recording industry association don't create music, the recording industry association aren't needed to get the music out to the public anymore, the recording industry don't give the settlements to the artists and finally the recording industry lobby the fines up to rediculous amounts that would bankrupt any normal person and then offer to settle displaying that they don't need the fines to be as high as they are (the average settlement is just a few percent of the original charge, if they can afford to carry on this way then the fines are disporportionate) and that they are purely extorting money since nobody can afford to risk the full fine.

If the artists submitted the songs straight to ITMS, Magnatune, Napster or a similar system they could sell them at half the price and still make a greater amount since the middlemen who take most of the profit are gone. In the past artists couldn't set up CD presses or advertise themselves, but now they just need some studio time and a website - the RIAA and co. are redundant. With this system the artists could also, quite fairly, sue copyright infringers for the value that they deprived the artist of (say $50 per song to account for repeated uploads, and force them to pay legal fees if they loose).

If there's a gaping hole in this argument feel free to point it out, but I don't see anything that the artists can't do themselves/pay for independently rather than signing their rights to the RIAA's companies.

Just like the parent said, except not to an opera house.

Donate here or here

Or buy them some music from here where the artist gets 50% of the proceeds. BTW, don't be fooled into thinking that iTunes or whatever gives money to artists. It's just as bad as buying a CD. Unfortunately, there's no way to buy music you hear on popular music stations and actually have a reasonable portion of that music get to the artist </rant>

So you are saying that minority groups with more cash to flash than possibly the majority, dictate law to an extent. Doesn't that seem wrong?

The theory is that these small groups are representative of the population as a whole, much in the same way that an elected official is chosen based on the will of the majority and, in theory, represents the views of that majority. It isn't perfect, but it reminds me of that Yogi Berra quote: "In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is." Most democracies function via representation, where a small group represents the whole. Keep in mind that the laws must also be debated and voted upon. Everyone has the opportunity to see which bills are on the table and contact their governmental representative to voice their concerns. That representative, if he/she wants to be re-elected, will tend to follow what the majority of people support. As the bill makes its way through the process of various drafts, debates, and finally voting, that representative influences the bill and causes it to be adopted, amended, or rejected. Not every new law enacted is so altrustic, for lack of a better word, (consider: PATRIOT and CAPPS) but you can chalk that up to the theory/practice difference again.

People I know who download music via P2P generally have no intention of buying the album whether they aquire the music via P2P or not. In reality this means of aquisition primarily becomes a form of advertising.

This is prevailent with movies also. Who likes 'Lord of the Rings', downloads it and then doesn't see it on the big screen or buy the dvd?

If shared music becomes a form of advertising, then you would see businesses start up to take advantage of the situation. In fact, this has already happened. That's just one example, but there's many online music sites which encourage people to experience the music and pay for it if they like it (sometimes even specifying the amount they want to pay), shareware style. Will people take to this kind of music marketing? That remains to be seen. It certainly needs a lot more exposure for it to happen. Popular music today is played on radio and you can watch music videos on TV. If you like it, you can go and purchase a CD in a store. People like products with shiny labels. One reason why alternatives haven't popped up is because it takes a lot of money to achieve that kind of recognition in the public. The RIAA/MPAA system, while flawed, has at least been proven to work.

Also... Magnatune.com

First, it is platform-neutral for browsing. I was able to look at the selection and search from Linux. iTMS rquires iTunes, which is only for Mac and Windows. BuyMusic.com is brower-based, but stupidly checks specifically for IE.

Great. So Mac and Linux people can browse. Can we buy, should we be so inclined? And most importantly, can we actually use what we've purchased? For that last, I'm pretty sure the answer is no. That DRMed WMA music requires a version of WMP that doesn't exist on Linux. And I'm not certain it'll work on the Mac version of WMP.

I think I'll stick with iTMS, thank you very much. Oh, and Magnitune, if they have music I like. No DRM at all; how civilized is that!

AllofMP3
Magnatune

AllofMP3 is a Russion site that sells scads of mainstream popular music for $0.01/MB. Magnatune is an Indie lable that lets you decide how much to pay and the artist gets a HEFTY chunk of it. Both services let you chose between mp3, ogg, flac (Allof MP3 has even more choices - It impressed the hell out of me.)

Both services also alow you to preview the whole song or album before you buy it.

Lots of solutions have been suggested -- VMWare, a self-signed root certificate, various driver hacks, and hardware hacks all the way down to a quality microphone.

For that matter, what about ReactOS? And what about user feedback?

Most users would not buy a DVD that required them to play it on a computer. Somehow, I'm guessing the hardware on any "trusted" DVD player will be _very_ easy to hack -- something like a modchip? Add to that the fact that we already have non-compliant DVD players, and most of us don't want to go buy a new one.

As for me, I will quietly sit here borrowing CDs from people and ripping flac files (or buying them from magnatune), and as soon as DVD burners or terabyte storage gets cheap enough and a good format is available, I'll be ripping full-quality DVDs.

Once they've got us all locked into an Orwellian DMCA scheme, I laugh and pull out my multi-terabyte archive of stuff, release it onto Kazaa, start giving away burned copies on street corners with only a license that insists that for each copy I give to someone, they must burn two for someone else...

This is not because I'm evil, and I hope that I will never end up doing that. I would rather use something like Magnatune and actually pay the artists and be completely unrestricted in how I use the music. I would rather still use Creative Commons licensed stuff, but honestly, I haven't seen The Matrix nearly enough times. Fatboy Slim, Prodigy, and Jimi Hendrix are all still damn good. I don't need to buy new music, and so I would start the piracy like mad if I ever thought that such things would be limited in their use.

I would probably choke to death on rage when I could no longer listen to classic songs about freedom, or even songs from ICP and Limp Bizkit about breaking heads for no reason in absolute disrespect of authroity, without surrenduring my freedoms to a central authority -- without playing them all on some offshoot of Longhorn.

I almost did anyway when I heard Metallica bitching about Napster -- I wanted to throw some of their own lyrics back at them. Lyrics like "So fucking what?" was my first reaction. My next reaction was somewhat longer: "All the justice pain and greed money talking" but I'm not sure that's actually what's being said. Either way, the whole song "And Justice For All" rebels against exactly what I thought of Metallica as doing.

I want lossless compression for my music (yes, I use FLAC) that I'd like to purchase online.

Tried Magnatune?

That said, if Outkast were not on a major label, and if they had a place where I could buy merchandise - whether it be cds or other "stuff" - I probably would throw some bucks their way. Maybe so with Pink as well, although probably not with Alicia unless they offered a $3.95 hat pin or something.

I feel obliged to share - period. If that means sharing "intangible" assets because I'm broke, so be it. If it means sharing my income with the lady who does my laundry for $30 a week when I'm perfectly capable of doing it myself, that'll work too. I have a whole stack of Linda's CDs here I bought for $6 each from a Russian retail outlet. Do I think Linda got ANY money from my purchase? No - but I really wanted the music and $6 a pop is cheap enough it doesn't hurt my bottom line so if I should find a LEGITIMATE contact where I can make sure Linda gets paid, she'll be getting some cash from me - and it definitely will be more than $6 for each of the 8 discs I have.

Meanwhile, because I'm all but certain the CDs I purchased were pirated, I have no reservations about ripping them to 320kbps mp3 and plastering them all over usenet (in fact, many of them are probably still on your favorite nntp server).

I really think price is irrelevant when it comes to such things. I downloaded a CD of MP3s from usenet a couple of weeks back that quickly became some of my favorite new tracks. When I went online to search for the artist, I was pleasantly surprised when the trail led me right back to the GPL community. So now I can choose how much I wish to reward the artist and download essentially perfect copies (FLAC, WAV, etc) of every track. I can even license the work for my own commercial use with a few mouse clicks.

Linda... and Pink... and Neil (as in Young) are you listening? That $18 selection has your names on it - just give us the chance.

That said, if Outkast were not on a major label, and if they had a place where I could buy merchandise - whether it be cds or other "stuff" - I probably would throw some bucks their way. Maybe so with Pink as well, although probably not with Alicia unless they offered a $3.95 hat pin or something.

I feel obliged to share - period. If that means sharing "intangible" assets because I'm broke, so be it. If it means sharing my income with the lady who does my laundry for $30 a week when I'm perfectly capable of doing it myself, that'll work too. I have a whole stack of Linda's CDs here I bought for $6 each from a Russian retail outlet. Do I think Linda got ANY money from my purchase? No - but I really wanted the music and $6 a pop is cheap enough it doesn't hurt my bottom line so if I should find a LEGITIMATE contact where I can make sure Linda gets paid, she'll be getting some cash from me - and it definitely will be more than $6 for each of the 8 discs I have.

Meanwhile, because I'm all but certain the CDs I purchased were pirated, I have no reservations about ripping them to 320kbps mp3 and plastering them all over usenet (in fact, many of them are probably still on your favorite nntp server).

I really think price is irrelevant when it comes to such things. I downloaded a CD of MP3s from usenet a couple of weeks back that quickly became some of my favorite new tracks. When I went online to search for the artist, I was pleasantly surprised when the trail led me right back to the GPL community. So now I can choose how much I wish to reward the artist and download essentially perfect copies (FLAC, WAV, etc) of every track. I can even license the work for my own commercial use with a few mouse clicks.

Linda... and Pink... and Neil (as in Young) are you listening? That $18 selection has your names on it - just give us the chance.

But re-encode it on a new format and you will tell the difference. Anyway, I'm now downloading a FLAC-encoded album from Magnatune; I paid $8.

It already happened, but they don't limit to crappy lossy formats; you get those for free :o

Magnatune has been mentioned before, and it offers entire albums from $4-$18 (it's up to you how much you want to pay), free access to streams of the music you want to preview, and you end up purchasing two downloadable .zip files: one with pre-compressed .mp3s, and one with WAV files(!) -- and no DRM whatsoever.

I've bought two albums to date (mrEpic and Brad Sucks) and recommend them both highly. Enjoy!

You may be interested in Magnatune.

Try before you buy. Low prices. Seems worthwhile to me.

Magnatune offers a multitude of formats including Ogg, MP3, WAV, and FLAC.

I'm sure we'll see the usual gamut of heavy-handed tactics (as not so long ago seen with 'net radio) from them. From this brief conversation at least some of them seem pretty damned smug. It's a humourous exchange:

Jan: Depending on how you treat your musicians, you may or may not be evil. How do you treat your musicians?

Exec: Well, I think we treat them pretty good.

Jan: Do they make any money?

Exec: Um... well, you know. It varies from contract to contract.

(No affiliation with Magnatune, I just think it's a good idea).

I spoke to 'Mrs. Magnatune' at sxsw last weekend. Really great guys/gals trying to fight the good fight - supporting artists along the way. Sure, they don't do a lot of promotion but it's still *some* exposure to small bands - 50% beats nothing at all. I have a stack of their compilation CDs here - it's *all* good stuff.

According to their blog, they are negotiating to get their catalog on itms as well as emusic soon.

Open music is what Magnatune.com sells. From the site: "All songs are available in MP3, CD-quality WAV, OGG, FLAC and MP3-VBR: download whichever formats you like." The best part is you can download and audition the music, then decide what you want to pay, if anything. "Magnatune lets you choose how much you want to pay for your downloaded album. The more you choose to pay, the more the artist makes, because at Magnatune, half goes directly to the artist, while the other half supports Magnatune." They are also members of the Creative Commons.

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated in any way with Magnatune.com. This is just a really cool idea whose time has come.

Here is another service along the same lines and even less evil: Magnatune, "we are not evil." Pay as much as you want (within reason, natch'). There is not a huge selection yet, but maybe if more peeps start buying from them....

bleep.com, magnatune.com, enough said

That "ghetto" you're talking about is basically 90% of the world. In this case I affirm with all my heart that the only "ghetto" is the one already being built right here in the US - a ghetto that I rarely find need to visit. CNN, MSNBC, AOL - I don't buy CDs, I don't buy cable TV, I don't even receive dead tree magazines. The only DVDs I've purchased recently came form Hong Kong and the only CDs I've bought recently (that weren't part of a creative commons project) are from Russia and Turkey. So your assertion is that all these countries will just bend over and wait for us to deliver "the big package" of culture and commerce? That the creative commons project will fail even when it has available to it hosts like those operating in Norway and Russia?

Ooookay. Sure. Aaaaaaaanything you say....

Magnatune

Try before you buy. When you buy, you have the option of downloading pristine versions to burn a high quality CD from.

The problem at the moment is that in order for this to be doable with an album, you need high speed internet. Otherwise it takes a long time to download a half gig.

No monitoring software or new taxes, and independents already use it right now. Magnatune, which features the 49%-sad & 51%-hilarious slogan: "We are not evil," and doesn't seem to have work very hard to explain such a slogan these days... If you want try-before-you-buy and think artists should benefit as much as publishers (say, 50-50!) you should check out Magnatune (their music's also surprisingly-good!).
JMR

Speaking ONLY for myself (but yes, I'm commercially-biased, etc.)

...they offer the Bleep Music Store. All files are high-quality (VBR with the settings cranked up) MP3s, unprotected -- they *gasp* treat you like a customer instead of a serf. Also you can preview tracks -- not just 30 seconds of a track, but all of it (albeit in 30 second chunks, so you can't just rip the whole track to a .wav file before buying). Also there's Magnatune (tagline: "We are not evil" ;-} ). Warp have the advantage of 'famous names' though, like Aphex Twin or LFO.

• Magnatune
• Monotonik
• Various others
• And, of course, my own music.

There are also a number of free sources for legal music on the web, especially if you aren't into mainstream pop. Band sites are good.

The difference is that you end up listening to music that is not on the radio, has never been on the radio, and never will be. If this is a plus or minus is up to you.

A few selections:

• 6 For 12
• Anything Box
• Machinae Supremacy

European music and artists : independent (mp3).

ecompil : universal (wma)

a cool label

epitonic : good independent site (mp3)

This is just a selection from google

Granted, it doesn't have Britney Spears or Moby, but you may be surprised at what you can find there.

It's good to see more of these places cropping up.

Another good one is Magnatune, the "We are not evil" guys.

Now if only more artists would add content to places like this...

There is a universe of no-chargeback payment systems out there. Many of them also seem to have the property of being based around precious metals. The first online was e-gold in 1996. Others have arrived since then of somewhat similar flavour: e-bullion.com, pecunix.com, libertydollar.org, goldmoney.com.
A good comparison chart is here.
BTW, I see that magnatune.com supports one of these now, but ebay is still PayPal only - no surprise.

www.magnatune.com - "We are not evil."

However, some companies have popped up, like CD Baby and Magnatune, which provide services for independent artists (such as liasing with the online music stores) while having policies that are less likely to ruffle the feathers of the average P2P fan.

From a pure strategic standpoint, the move was brilliant. One large cash layout, and your only major competition is crushed, divided, and made irrelevant. From every OTHER standpoint, it was abhorrant. (especially in effectively stalling out any consumer-driven progression in the music industry for years)

My personal favorite alternative (which I have no problem plugging) is Magnatune. You're free to listen to the entirety of their collection via streaming MP3, your licensed with permission to share the files, and prices are negotiable. If you want to buy an album, you can select how much you pay from $1-$20, based on what you think the album is worth.

It's a truly ambitious model, and amazingly, they seem to be doing OK so far on the small scale. But can they move out of a 'niche' market? I doubt it.

Then you should check out MagnaTune. Download the mp3 for free, and if you like it, most artists provide FLAC or WAV as well as vbr mp3 and ogg when you "purchase" the song. Of course, they aren't big label artists, but they definitely do have classical/jazz (and to my delight, ambient techno)

Yes price fixing is bad, but I don't remember ever feeling like I overpaid for a CD or that a CD was too expensive.

If this were a band offering free MP3s for download, that might be interesting.

Check out the link in my sig, www.magnatune.com
Those artists are offering free MP3s of their albums.
Plus they get a 50% cut of what you decide to pay for the album. Great idea imo.
You buy the albums through the internet by the way, downloadable in different formats (WAV/OGG/MP3/FLAC)

CDBaby is also doing something like this. (although they sell real CD's, not downloads)

from their site:

We're a record label. But we're not evil.
We call it "try before you buy."
It's the shareware model applied to music.

Listen to hundreds of MP3'd albums from our artists. Or try our genre-based radio stations.
If you like what you hear, buy our music online for as little as $5 an album or license our music for commercial use.
Artists get a full 50% of the purchase price. And unlike most record labels, our artists keep the rights to their music.
Founded by musicians, for musicians.
No major label connections.
We are not evil.

A lot of the hip musicians aren't paying $50/hr to record anymore, they're recording on laptops in home studios, or even on the road. Some of them don't need a producer to make them sound like they can play, because they can actually play. We don't need to produce CDs, now that technology has made it kinda silly to ship bits around on plastic disks.

Getting into good venues? Probably still a market for a good agent, but that doesn't mean you have to sign your copyrights over to a monopolistic cartel.

And filtering? Well, there's Magnatune, a label that takes about 10 percent of bands who apply, handles all sales, gives half the money to the artists, and lets the artists keep the copyright. I'm streaming some pretty cool music from them as I type this. Plenty of room for non-evil labels...for now anyway. Collaborative filtering is a pretty active research area. Plain old word of mouth works pretty well on the Internet, too.

With the exact same technology, he could implement voluntary tipping and send most of the money direct to the artist. Artists could post their work to the database for free, Fanning takes a small cut of each payment, and people could find good songs they've never heard of the same way they did on Napster...by searching the directories of people who post music they like.

And don't tell me voluntary payments don't work...Magnatune lets you decide for yourself how much to pay for an album, as long as it's at least five bucks, and their average payment is over $9. People are willing to pay, because they know the artist is getting half.

Don't forget Magnatune.

The analogy can be taken further by noticing the internet-based competition to both industries. Magnatune and Ditech are notable examples of each.

There is a cool open source app called GiFT. It has clients for Linux, Mac and MS Windows. It can connect to OpenFT, Gnutella and FastTrack. It can be a replacement for Kazza.

I cannot understand why ANYONE would use Kazaa or some other closed source app to do their p2p activities. Not only is the spyware/adware crap, but you can NEVER trust the code or WHO puts out the code.

Anyone that does p2p should go to PeerGuardian. They put out a list of RIAA/MPAA and other IP addresses and IP ranges to block them from getting to your PC/Mac. The site can spit out the list for many software products like iptables, Shorewall, ZoneAlarm, Kerio Personal firewall, and other. USE THIS LIST.

One other point. If you DO uses any p2p app, make sure that you can disable browsing. That will stop the RIAA/MPAA and thier goons from checking out all your shares and making a nice list to sue you with. The average user that was or is being sued by the RIAA shared about 800 titles. The RIAA got that list by doing a search and browsing your shares. They then save that list of shares with your IP and wham, next thing you know you are bing sued. SO TURN OFF SHARE BROWSING.

Disclaimer:
I do not condone trading copyrighted material for which you do not have the permissions to do so. I personally listen to the same old CD's I have had for years since I cannot stand the crap comming out today. Bittorrent is great to grab missed episodes of the Simpsons and XFiles. Oh, and purchase music from MagnaTune.

Check out this non-evil label. The fact that they give exactly 50% of the sale price (not net profit) to the artist is one of my biggest reasons for buying there. That plus no-DRM MP3, OGG, FLAC and CD-quality WAV files (complete with CDDB info.)