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

People won't pay for DRM in the long run

[seanadams.com]

You download the DRM WMA weed file and can listen to it 3 times on any computer before deciding to purchase
it or not.

Sure - it's a free tril so I won't complain about the format.

If you do purchase it... ...then I get the song in a lossless format, complete with digitized cover art and free of any DRM, right? Because as a paying customer, I'd expect to get at least the sound quality and format versatility that the pirates are getting.

Yes, I did RTFA - the format is no surprise. When the only option for online buying is DRM, it only encourages piracy because regardless of whether you're prepared to pay for the content, it's the only way to get the music without funny restriction.

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

[damiam]

Ideally, there would be a set of standard formats (Speex, Vorbis, and FLAC would be one such set) supported by all devices and used by all users. Since that's not the case, sometimes we have to encode existing material into new forms. A lossless original allows you to create a Vorbis, WMA, or AAC file of ideal quality (the best that that format can achieve at that bitrate). A lossy original means that your newly transcoded lossy file provides lower quality at a higher bitrate (or significantly lower quality at a lower bitrate) than the ideal. Therefore, lossless originals are better.