UC System Chooses Mindawn Download Service

An anonymous reader writes "In hopes of stemming the tide of students freely sharing copyrighted multimedia files over their campus networks, the University of California (UC) system has selected an online music and video service that supports Windows, Mac OS, and Linux to provide downloadable music and video for its approximately 200,000 student population. Unlike iTunes (which only supports Mac OS X and Windows) and Napster (which is Windows-only), Mindawn works with Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. In addition, instead of providing downloads that are degraded by what is known as "lossy compression," downloads from Mindawn are offered in both Ogg Vorbis and FLAC formats." (Vorbis files are lossy too, though my tin ears can't always tell.)

Comments

Re:No Pink Floyd

[melikamp]

I thought that parent is a troll, so I went and tossed a few querries. Couldn't get any results. So I browsed. It looks like they carry a few hundred of albums. Wow. I've seen personal collections bigger than that. They've got nothing on a university lan.

Re:Heh... hilarious

[tepples]

Virtually every online music store other than iTMS uses the PlaysForSure format (MSDRM around WMA). This format does not work with iPod players. However, Mindawn provides FLAC, and FLAC can easily be transcoded into AAC (*.m4a) which iPod players do support.

From the FAQ...

[XeRXeS-TCN]

Mindawn seems to be more like a community site / online record company, rather than a music store in it's own right. *ANY* artists can sign up for $50 a year (or the current special deal of $50 for lifetime) and upload as many albums as they want, with 75% of the sale coming back to them if it's exclusive to Mindawn, and 55% if it isn't.

From the Artists FAQ:

Q. So what's the catch to get in to Mindawn?
A. It costs you as an artist just $50 per year to have your account, with as many albums and tracks as you want. You don't even have to print CDs -- just put some of those new songs you're working on up for sale online. You don't even have to even work around the concept of an "album" if you don't want to. Just create your account and load your content -- you can be 'live' within 30 minutes of opening your account. UPDATE: For a limited time the $50 fee is for a lifetime account, don't miss this limited opportunity to sign up with Mindawn for a one time fee of $50 for LIFE!

Q. How much do I make from those sales?
A. We have two royalty models:

75% for electronic content exclusive to Mindawn. However, you can change at any time to the second model:

55% for non-exclusive electronic content

That means you get either 55% or 75% of the total price -- far better for artists than most record labels or iTMS.

So while they do work with record companies, a lot (most?) of their music will inevitably be from independant artists, and anyone who wants to share their work. From the Customer FAQ:

Q. What kind of content can I expect?
A. You won't likely find major label releases -- we're geared more towards supporting independent artists and small record labels. Our system is also not closed to anyone, and we are adding content at an exponential rate. You can use our sophisticated search technology to find music you will likely be interested in, as well as demo the available songs as mentioned above. You're likely to discover some hidden gems that you wouldn't have found any other way.

Not a system for everyone, since many students will be more interested in the big names which tend to get pirated in the first place, but a nice enough system, and the artists certainly aren't hard done by. They even provide software, MARS (Mindawn Audio Ripping Software), for ripping CD, WAV or AIFF to OGG or FLAC format for using with their system. That's not to say that you couldn't use flac/oggenc, especially since it isn't F/OSS, but it's nice that they've provided their own multi-platform utility with a GUI to help out in that regard... not to mention the fact that the MARS documentation says that you need oggenc/flac/cdparanoia installed on Linux in any case.