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You can get DRM free tunes (mp3) from their site, or sign up to their newsletter for free mp3s.

http://www.theymightbegiants.com/album-venue.htm

Can they buy the music directly from the artist's web site?

Check out They Might Be Downloads. Their prices compete with iTMS, but you get high-quality, LAME-encoded MP3s without any DRM. You can also pay a little extra to get FLAC rips of selected albums.

Give away some songs for free (maybe enter Songfight! once in a while and link to it), but just let people know that the songs are for sale and that they're DRM-free for the customer's convenience, and that you trust them. Charge a reasonable price and make the site easy to use and you'll get customers.

Also, Apple said, the first 500,000 customers to open a new iTunes account in the United States using PayPal as their form of payment before March 31 will receive five free songs. Apple said some restrictions did apply to that offer and referred questions to the PayPal.com Website for information.

They Might Be Giants sell songs for $0.99US, too, and the $$ goes directly to the artists. Sorry, no PayPal.

Their succinct advice for Linux users?

Linux Users
Rock on. We recommend Firefox (see above).

Congratulations Firefox!

Ideally I'd like:

• ca. $5/album
• if you throw in all the album art in printable-quality pdf format or something, jack the price to maybe $6 an album.
• buying track-per-track doesn't really interest me much generally, price that however you want so long as it's no more than $1/track on the rare occasion I *do* want just one song.
• No DRM, of course. mp3 or ogg is fine, not terribly particular
• good tagging of the files I get
• No subscriptions
• Legal, of course. I like it when musicians get money.

Emusic was absolutely heavenly before they changed their pricing scheme. They're still pretty good I guess, but at ca. 23c/song (higher once you've gone beyond your subscribed monthly "limit") it's still a bit steep for trying bands you've never heard before, and seeing as though Emusic does mostly indie stuff that you've probably never heard of before, that's kind of a drawback. (Mind you, I found some really really great bands on there when they were doing unlimited subscriptions, but I probably wouldn't have heard most of them on their new subscription service.)

Bleep is great. I don't mind the $10/album thing quite so much because I'd otherwise be stuck importing a lot of those albums which drives up the average price for the hardcopy album. Plus they've got stuff otherwise only available on vinyl, etc.

They Might Be Giants' online store is great, mostly for their live shows available there, though the price ($10/album) is a bit steep for anyone who's not already a fan, and obviously the other drawback is that only TMBG is available there.

• bleep.com (Warp Records)
• They Might be Giants (and Back Office Music, the place which created their store)
• Even though their subscription levels kind of suck now, emusic.com.

The recording industry will NEVER allow the online sale of an un-DRM'd digital audio file.

Odd. http://www.theymightbegiants.com/ appears to offer completely DRM free album downloads.

They Might Be Giants sells unprotected 256 kbit MP3s of their catalog for 99 cents per song or $9.99 per album.

Epitonic sells a much more diverse catalog and offers songs in MP3 format.

eMusic competes with iTunes by providing non-DRMed MP3 files. Of course they don't have as much major label stuff, but it's the only store I'd "buy" music from, aside from http://www.theymightbegiants.com/ and Magnatune.

Personally, I can't get worked up over this. If Real wants to offer a service to cater to iPod owners, and want to chase every firmware update -- fine with me. Consumers can choose who they want to buy their online music from, and given a choice I'm sure I wouldn't buy from Real (being a PowerBook user in Canada, however, I don't have a choice between either of them, so it's moot).

What I did get a chuckle from was this:

We're asking that you...support the right of your own customers to make their own choices about where they buy music for the iPod.

I did -- I bought a song online a few weeks ago from a non-Apple online source: The Might Be Giants sells their songs for $0.99 USD -- get this -- in MP3 format! What a concept! And they play on my iPod!

The only company preventting Real from selling music to iPod users is Real. Apple supports a number of non-DRM'ed formats -- they simply have to pick one and use it.

Yaz.

Why is it that every single article on TMBG calls them a "quirky pop duo?"

Google reference

Somebody should buy these guys a thesaurus.

It's worth checking out Their download store too if you haven't done so already. They're going to be offering their own bootlegs, interestingly. I imagine they're making a pretty huge profit margin compared to their per-CD profits on regular-old CD's.

They Might Be Giants also sell 256 kbps LAME MP3 versions of their songs. I sent a letter ot them stating:

Dear so-called "musicians":

Thank you for your decision to go with a closed-source, proprietary, obscure "codec" for your music. If you cared about your "fans," you would have chosen Ogg Vorbis. Ogg Vorbis is a superior-quality, free as in speech codec that works out of the box on all free as in speech operating systems.

In conclusion, I'm afraid that while your efforts are admirable, they will be futile unless you embrace the true "community" of Open Source.

Sincerely,
Seth Finklestein
Music Expert

Apparantly They Might Be Giants(the band) have decided to start selling their new CD on their website as pure unadulterated actual MP3s! None of that other crap that has tons of arbitrary usage rights. "You can burn this song to 3 CDs, transfer to up to 2 computers, and listen to it up to 14 times. This song will self-destruct in 5 days, sucker!" Is it a GOOD idea for them to be selling the actual MP3s. Obviously, they realize that a lot of people will emidiately put it on Kazaa. But on the other hand, by selling it on their website on their own, the $9.99 that you pay for the CD goes straight to their pocket, instead of countless middlemen.

they might be giants use the internet a lot. they may not be in exactly the same situation, but they did manage to maintain a fan base and release new music even when they were between having a label to support them.

they did what i thought was a pretty cool thing they did when they sold mp3's on emusic.com. if you bought the entire album's worth of mp3's, they sent you a cd of those songs, too. they also have some mp3's available for free, which i believe helps them sell the others.

check out their techniques on their websites tmbg.com and theymightbegiants.com.

of course, it also doesn't hurt that they are almost always on tour.

TMBG used to have an inovative service called "dial-a-song". You call a phone number which is answered by a restored vintage answering machine and listen to an unreleased song. A computer hooked up to the answering machine changes the song to another unreleased song once an hour.

The album liner notes always said something like "Remember, the call is free if you call from work".

I just noticed that they now have a dial-a-song webpage, which is also free when you connect from work!

Besides, how many of the so-called artists being "stolen" from are actual artists. The songwriters and producers make most of the money off of people like Britney. They developed a product and they sold it.

Do you have a problem with this? Any pretty girl with a good voice can do Britney Spears' job but very few people can write or produce hit records. The people who deserve the money are the song writers and producers not the dime-a-dozen poptart teen idols.

Now take a look at a band like Fugazi. During the 80's and 90's major labels offered them millions of dollars to sign with them but they never did. Instead, they produced their own albums and sold their own product through distributors, catalogs and at shows. For $8 when most CD's cost 14.99. And you know what, they sold millions of albums and there are a lot of other artists out there doing the same thing. I'm looking forward to the day when more artists ditch the labels and sell their product over the internet. It's happening for some and hopefully more real artists will follow suit.

What I don't understand is why people keep thinking that Napster == money to the artist. Napster is about getting music for free. It isn't about buying music online, paying artists directly or supporting independent artists. Napster screws the RIAA and the artists even if they are independent or not. Slashdot recently had an article where an independent group with a strong web presence (TMBG) that supports online music expressed reservations about Napster for circumventing the connection between the band and the artist.

As for your friends who signed ballbreaker deals with the RIAA labels, they should have gone independent instead. Most of the music I listen to is from independent groups that were too hardcore for the RIAA labels or didn't fit their expectations, yet these artists are now richer than most RIAA artists who sell twice or thrice as much as they do because they didn't sign any ballbreaker deals, massive advertising nor having to sellout.

NOTE: I am not against independent artists (I listen mostly to non-RIAA groups) nor am I against paying artists directly (i.e. Fairtunes). I am against people obtaining free music then claiming that using Napster somehow benefits the artists.

Yes, after months of pure frustration with our computer based system, John and John have returned to the analog scene of the phone machine, and although the songs don't change as frequently, they are fresh fresh fresh and now we have a two song policy so you get more songs with every call.

the website is fine, but the phone number is Slashdotted!