Sir Mix-A-Lot Using Weed To Distribute Music

An anonymous reader writes "Hip-hop musician Sir Mix-A-Lot has made his new CD Daddy's Home available for download using Weed technology. Weed is a relatively new file sharing system based principles of shareware and referrals. You download the DRM WMA weed file and can listen to it 3 times on any computer before deciding to purchase it or not. If you do purchase it (at a price set by the artist), you will receive referral fees (20%, 10%, 5%) for the next 3 generations of people that purchase your copy. The artist always receives 50% of the price. Certainly an interesting approach to distributing music in a world of p2p and iTunes."

Comments

Baby Got DRM

[linux_user_31337]

While I'm disappointed that they're distributing DRM'ed WMA files (non-Windows users will certainly be out of luck), I don't want to be too quick to dismiss this. Any distribution channel that gives the artist 50% of the sale is already better than almost anything else out there.

Can anyone think of a better system that gives the artist this much or more of the sale?

Re:People won't pay for DRM in the long run

[clifyt]

"If you do purchase it... ...then I get the song in a lossless format..."

You know this arguement always pisses me off.

What makes MP3s any less lossless than CDA. Its another format and thats it. As a musician (and more to the point, an engineer and tech for real musicians), I don't think I've recorded anything in the last 2 years where the master wasn't at 24bit 96Khz...that means any CD ya listen to is VERY lossy.

Then again, most of the musicians I've worked with ask me to burn it down to MP3 so they can listen to it on their pods and don't care about the difference -- and neither do it...its not like I'm sitting around a listening room smoking a pipe pontificating about the clean lows and the crisp upper range of the latest f'n Sir Mix-A-Lot cd...

I would like to see digital music come with liner notes though (cover art bores me...the liner is where its at).

Thinking about the costs of doing it

[rcastro0]

How can this be less expensive as a means of distribution than simply setting up a server and sell direct, like Apple did ? I mean, don't think about only bandwidth costs but:
1) Costs of paying people down the pyramid
2) Fraud Management
3) "CRM" with the huge mass of "distribution partners"

Unless they have some brilliant marketing concept hidden in there, which I may have missed, it seems like just a more expensive way of doing the same thing Itunes does.