Instead they play nice and hope you do the same. I.e. they let you stream full traks for free, and ask you not to distribute them on P2P networks even if is legal.
Exactly right. Since DRM is both evil to the typical user, and frequently easily cracked, it doesn't provide real value. I'd rather trust people to be honest and support a business they like. Besides, there are much easier ways to steal music (p2p comes to mind) than to fuss over Magnatune's m3u files.
Of course they can be "easily cracked" -- they are not protected in the least, because I want Magnatune to work easily and simply on every computer, and not spend my time fighting my customer base too prevent 1% who wants to "download it all for free" -- those people would clearly never pay Magnatune for music anyhow, even if we had DRM to "protect it".
Also, because you can "'name your price" when you buy from Magnatune, if you don't think something's worth much, you don't have to pay much.
"for non-commercial use, and non-commercial sharing."
That's right, all the music on Magnatune is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Derivative-NonCommercial license, so non-commercial playing, sampling, reuse is explicitly allowed and encouraged.
"If I were them, I'd put out a patch for Shoutcast/Icecast in xmms and talk to the Nullsoft folks about doing the same for WinAMP to stream a "buy it" (or at least "for more information on this song") link along with each song. "
In the ID3v2 standard, there are meta tags available for this, such as defining the web site for this artist.
Yesterday, I re-ID3ed all the MP3s at Magnatune, so that they all have these extended ID3v2 tags. I'm told that some players (winamp v2/v3 doesn, buy maybe v5 does) display this info.
"I thought Magnatunes had Flac? I only see wav, 128kb MP3 and high quality VBR MP3. I grabbed the VBR MP3, though I would have liked Flac."
The Magnatune RAID array crashed last week, and I don't back up the FLAC files, since I have a script to recreate them which takes just a few days. That Williamson album you bought is now available once again as a FLAC.
-john
"Is there any way paying customers can get lyrics electronically? "
I'm planning on offering things like liner notes & lyrics in the future. I haven't yet, simply because it's just me running the site, and I wanted to focus on signing new bands -- the biggest complaint people have is "not enough selection". But, it takes a lot of time to find good stuff.
"What about an option to order a professionally recorded CD with slick label and insert via snail mail? (Extra cost, of course.) "
I've looked at the economics of it, and it's just not feasible. The labor to burn a cd & label and snail mail it adds about $5, plus postage, and I would be doing lots of mind-numbing work instead of signing bands and improving the site. The only way I could do it is if I had a large number orders and started hiring minimum wage people to fill orders. I just don't want to go there.
I am looking for label partners to release my best-selling bands, and have an arrangement with a classical label to do that. I hope to do the same with some other genres. In that case, you could buy the CD at Tower records. There is less profit in it, but it seems like we can squeeze $4.80 in profit from each CD sold. That's certainly much less than the typical $8 we get online, but it'll be worth it for the wider distribution.
"Just found they've got Joglaresa in the classical section. Somewhat eosoteric, but Belinda Sykes is highly critically acclaimed in her field "
I'm glad you noticed that Sykes was there -- I was immensely psyched to have her on Magnatune. I'm really big into Medieval music, and she's excellent. I'm hoping to sign Shira Kammen next week (from Project Ars Nova, Sequentia and others) who's also a heavy hitter in the medieval field.
You may also want to check out Catherine King, a renaissance singer who is also immensely acclaimed (she's my favorite renassance singer, and not because she's on Magnatune) -- her voice also does the spine-shiver thing for me.
I compiled thttpd, and it worked for GIFs, but gave me "an unexpected error has occured" for zips and mp3s. I tried both the release and beta versions. And, the makefile was seriously broken for installing on a current linux distribution.
I'm looking at Mathopd http://www.mathopd.org/ as another high speed async web server. AOLServer is holding up, but my load average is 18, which is not good.
"In addition, "mp3.com, originally" had an additional problem: artists could provide recordings only in 128 kbps MP3 format, which is capable of nowhere near the fidelity of pristine 16-bit 44.1 kHz stereo PCM audio to the good ear."
With Magnatune, I get a CD Master from the artist for each album I sell, and make both perfect-quality WAVs (for buyers) and 128kb mp3s available (for free). I agree, that a CD made from mp3s isn't a great thrill. I'll be offering FLACs of the CD soon.
Magnatune has acquired a portable recording studio, and will soon begin recording artists specifically for release on Magnatune.
When under a recording agreement with Magnatune, artists will be able to record an album at no cost to them, Magnatune will distribute and promote the album, and the artist will still own all rights to the recording. For example, the artist will be able to print their own CDs of the recording and sell them at gigs.
Magnatune acquired the recording system so that it would be able to broaden its reach, and include talented artists who don't have the thousands of dollars (at a minimum) it takes to make a typical record studio-recorded album.
For the gear-heads out there, the recording setup comprises of:
- a 17" mac powerbook - pro tools digital audio workstation software - digidesign's digi002 8 track recording console - an additional 8 tracks of recording capacity (16 tracks total) - a variety of high end "Studio Projects" microphones and stands - various off-board racks and effects (and software-based ones)
In most cases, it is easiest if the recording happens at our premises in Berkeley, California (it's still a lot of gear to move around), but in some case we will record at a band's performance site.
" I have had licensing deals where the arrangement was to receive 50% of the gross, and the labels I have worked with just don't pay. And then they go out of business."
Yow, I hadn't heard of that before. I guess what that means is that if an artist signs with a small company, even if the deal is good, the artist had better make sure that the company is going to survive.
"IANAL, but I think that just says that they retain the right to sell any songs you've given to them, not that they have the rights to said songs. (ie, they have a NON-exclusive license to sell/promote said song)"
Correct, what this is saying is that even if we "part ways" we (Magnatune) still owe you 50% on anything that we've sold. We have no control over what you do with your songs (ie, you've never "lost" any rights in dealing with us)
This clause was actually written this way because of what an artist's lawyer said: "even if we part ways, you still have to pay us 50% on anything you sold, you're not off the hook on that".
I think it's important to point out that we never take any rights away from an artist -- we are granted certain non-exclusive rights (namely, to sell their music and split what money we find) but in no way do we restrict what the musician can do with the music.
So, when some writes "So, there is no way an artist can part ways and get the rights back - Magnatude retains them" I don't think that's correct, because there's no rights the artist lost to get back. What's really occuring when they kill the contract is that they want us to stop finding money for their music.
I believe Stallman makes a big point of making clear that "open" does not mean "non-commercial". His presentations make a big deal of saying that it's possible to be "free" (as in freedom) and charge money.
When I decided to label Magnatune I used the Open Source Definition http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php as my litmus test, as well as all I'd heard from Stallman.
Except for not providing the musical equivalent of "source code" (ie, the original MIDI and track-by-track breakdown) I believe Magnatune fits that definition of open. I'd like to provide the sources, and will start doing so, once I figure out the technical issues of a common format that people can use.
"I found some medieval music I like, but am concerned about how they will handle my CC number. The "buy" link doesn't seem to use SSL."
SSL is there now. I had been waiting until I got my VISA merchant account (about 2 weeks ago) before getting SSL, since before that I was using a 3rd party payment system.
"Does anyone know if they plan selling physical CDs? I am still of the old school, want to have the physical media with nice cover etc."
We have a partnership with a British classical label, called Avie, that also splits revenue (not profits) with their artists -- the only artist friendly label of any size we've found.
We plan on releasing the top-selling classical artists on CD, distributed through normal means. Avie is well distributed in the USA, in places such as Tower Records, so that's where you'll find them. Probably, the first few CDs will be in the first quarter of 2004.
Naxos is a terrible deal for their musicians. They buy out all the rights to the CD, so that the artist sees and advance for recording their CD, and never any money again. That's one the reasons they've stuck to less-well-known musicians, because they can be exploited.
I have a good amount of classical music from the Ukraine and Russie. Also, about 1/2 of my electronica acts from eastern europe (so much good music there!)
I've had very little luck with spain and south america -- not very web savvy and (so far) paranoid about the web.
Yes, choral music from a church is fine, as long as the performance and recording quality are great.
Maybe someone like Tool should release an album under this label to see how it goes. Yeah, right
Some REALLY big names in classical have signed up to Magnatune. See Classical - Trevor Pinnock is huge, and I've worshipped Jacob Heringman for years...
mp3.com never selected their artists -- anyone who wanted to could upload. This made for great growth for them, but for someone like me who wants to listen to good music while doing something else, I find mp3.com very frustrating.
Also, mp3.com didn't try to get licensing deals. For some my artists who I can get licensing deals for, there's a lot more money there than selling $8 downloads.
I love the model, I just wish that they had a studio somewhere. I am a musician myself and would love to have some talented studio professionals who also happened to have some ethics.
from http://forums.magnatune.com/read/messages?id=54386 7:
Magnatune acquires portable recording studio
Magnatune has acquired a portable recording studio, and will soon begin recording artists specifically for release on Magnatune.
When under a recording agreement with Magnatune, artists will be able to record an album at no cost to them, Magnatune will distribute and promote the album, and the artist will still own all rights to the recording. For example, the artist will be able to print their own CDs of the recording and sell them at gigs.
Magnatune acquired the recording system so that it would be able to broaden its reach, and include talented artists who don't have the thousands of dollars (at a minimum) it takes to make a typical record studio-recorded album.
For the gear-heads out there, the recording setup comprises of:
- a 17" mac powerbook - pro tools digital audio workstation software - digidesign's digi002 8 track recording console - an additional 8 tracks of recording capacity (16 tracks total) - a variety of high end "Studio Projects" microphones and stands - various off-board racks and effects (and software-based ones)
In most cases, it is easiest if the recording happens at our premises in Berkeley, California (it's still a lot of gear to move around), but in some case we will record at a band's performance site
The problem wasn't bandwidth but Apache and Squid, which weren't up to the task (even though there was plenty of CPU).
I loaded up another proxy, and AOLServer (www.aolserver.com) to handle graphics, and most of mp3 streaming drop-outs are gone now. However, I will be looking for a higher-load proxy server than squid ("oops" is too unstable on linux for me)
Getting 50 % of the profit is nice and all, but if you don't get any money to record the music in the first place it's kinda pointless.
Most musicians who come to me already have a self-released CD, so it's not an issue.
However, I also:
have a recording studio where I record folks free-of-charge, and they own the recording afterwords. I'm recording a medieval ensemble, a lutenist, and a middle-eastern musician right now. See http://forums.magnatune.com/read/messages?id=54386 7 for more info
I've funded a few recordings, such as the "Luis Milan" recording at http://magnatune.com/artists/edward_martin but I can't do it too often, or for expensive acts (sorry, no venture capital! just me!)
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but independent labels--in my experience--are no more likely (and perhaps less so) to ever actually PAY you.
I totally agree -- the 50% that indie labels refer to is always on the *profits*, not on gross sales, so no money ever arrives, because they either a) don't make any money, or b) assign expenses from money-losing acts to the money-making acts, so again there are no profits.
See http://magnatune.com/info/why for my story, about my wife who got one of those deals from an indie label and never saw a penny.
FYI, with Magnatune I give 50% of *gross* sales, with *no* expenses subtracted. That's the "not evil" part...
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly right. Since DRM is both evil to the typical user, and frequently easily cracked, it doesn't provide real value. I'd rather trust people to be honest and support a business they like. Besides, there are much easier ways to steal music (p2p comes to mind) than to fuss over Magnatune's m3u files.
Of course they can be "easily cracked" -- they are not protected in the least, because I want Magnatune to work easily and simply on every computer, and not spend my time fighting my customer base too prevent 1% who wants to "download it all for free" -- those people would clearly never pay Magnatune for music anyhow, even if we had DRM to "protect it".
Also, because you can "'name your price" when you buy from Magnatune, if you don't think something's worth much, you don't have to pay much.
-john (who runs Magnatune.com)
You made my day, thank you....
-john (the guy behind Magnatune)
That's right, all the music on Magnatune is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Derivative-NonCommercial license, so non-commercial playing, sampling, reuse is explicitly allowed and encouraged.
-john
In the ID3v2 standard, there are meta tags available for this, such as defining the web site for this artist.
Yesterday, I re-ID3ed all the MP3s at Magnatune, so that they all have these extended ID3v2 tags. I'm told that some players (winamp v2/v3 doesn, buy maybe v5 does) display this info.
-john
"I thought Magnatunes had Flac? I only see wav, 128kb MP3 and high quality VBR MP3. I grabbed the VBR MP3, though I would have liked Flac." The Magnatune RAID array crashed last week, and I don't back up the FLAC files, since I have a script to recreate them which takes just a few days. That Williamson album you bought is now available once again as a FLAC. -john
"Is there any way paying customers can get lyrics electronically? "
I'm planning on offering things like liner notes & lyrics in the future. I haven't yet, simply because it's just me running the site, and I wanted to focus on signing new bands -- the biggest complaint people have is "not enough selection". But, it takes a lot of time to find good stuff.
"What about an option to order a professionally recorded CD with slick label and insert via snail mail? (Extra cost, of course.) "
I've looked at the economics of it, and it's just not feasible. The labor to burn a cd & label and snail mail it adds about $5, plus postage, and I would be doing lots of mind-numbing work instead of signing bands and improving the site. The only way I could do it is if I had a large number orders and started hiring minimum wage people to fill orders. I just don't want to go there.
I am looking for label partners to release my best-selling bands, and have an arrangement with a classical label to do that. I hope to do the same with some other genres. In that case, you could buy the CD at Tower records. There is less profit in it, but it seems like we can squeeze $4.80 in profit from each CD sold. That's certainly much less than the typical $8 we get online, but it'll be worth it for the wider distribution.
-john (from Magnatune)
"Just found they've got Joglaresa in the classical section. Somewhat eosoteric, but Belinda Sykes is highly critically acclaimed in her field "
I'm glad you noticed that Sykes was there -- I was immensely psyched to have her on Magnatune. I'm really big into Medieval music, and she's excellent. I'm hoping to sign Shira Kammen next week (from Project Ars Nova, Sequentia and others) who's also a heavy hitter in the medieval field.
You may also want to check out Catherine King, a renaissance singer who is also immensely acclaimed (she's my favorite renassance singer, and not because she's on Magnatune) -- her voice also does the spine-shiver thing for me.
See http://magnatune.com/artists/heringman_king
-john (from Magnatune)
"you might also want to look at thttpd"
I compiled thttpd, and it worked for GIFs, but gave me "an unexpected error has occured" for zips and mp3s. I tried both the release and beta versions. And, the makefile was seriously broken for installing on a current linux distribution.
I'm looking at Mathopd http://www.mathopd.org/ as another high speed async web server. AOLServer is holding up, but my load average is 18, which is not good.
-john (from Magnatune)
"In addition, "mp3.com, originally" had an additional problem: artists could provide recordings only in 128 kbps MP3 format, which is capable of nowhere near the fidelity of pristine 16-bit 44.1 kHz stereo PCM audio to the good ear."
With Magnatune, I get a CD Master from the artist for each album I sell, and make both perfect-quality WAVs (for buyers) and 128kb mp3s available (for free). I agree, that a CD made from mp3s isn't a great thrill. I'll be offering FLACs of the CD soon.
-john
Anyway, where is your studio?
Berkeley, California -- here's the info:
Magnatune has acquired a portable recording studio, and will soon begin recording artists specifically for release on Magnatune.
When under a recording agreement with Magnatune, artists will be able to record an album at no cost to them, Magnatune will distribute and promote the album, and the artist will still own all rights to the recording. For example, the artist will be able to print their own CDs of the recording and sell them at gigs.
Magnatune acquired the recording system so that it would be able to broaden its reach, and include talented artists who don't have the thousands of dollars (at a minimum) it takes to make a typical record studio-recorded album.
For the gear-heads out there, the recording setup comprises of:
- a 17" mac powerbook
- pro tools digital audio workstation software
- digidesign's digi002 8 track recording console
- an additional 8 tracks of recording capacity (16 tracks total)
- a variety of high end "Studio Projects" microphones and stands
- various off-board racks and effects (and software-based ones)
In most cases, it is easiest if the recording happens at our premises in Berkeley, California (it's still a lot of gear to move around), but in some case we will record at a band's performance site.
" I have had licensing deals where the arrangement was to receive 50% of the gross, and the labels I have worked with just don't pay. And then they go out of business."
Yow, I hadn't heard of that before. I guess what that means is that if an artist signs with a small company, even if the deal is good, the artist had better make sure that the company is going to survive.
-john (from Magnatune)
"IANAL, but I think that just says that they retain the right to sell any songs you've given to them, not that they have the rights to said songs. (ie, they have a NON-exclusive license to sell/promote said song)"
Correct, what this is saying is that even if we "part ways" we (Magnatune) still owe you 50% on anything that we've sold. We have no control over what you do with your songs (ie, you've never "lost" any rights in dealing with us)
This clause was actually written this way because of what an artist's lawyer said: "even if we part ways, you still have to pay us 50% on anything you sold, you're not off the hook on that".
I think it's important to point out that we never take any rights away from an artist -- we are granted certain non-exclusive rights (namely, to sell their music and split what money we find) but in no way do we restrict what the musician can do with the music.
So, when some writes "So, there is no way an artist can part ways and get the rights back - Magnatude retains them" I don't think that's correct, because there's no rights the artist lost to get back. What's really occuring when they kill the contract is that they want us to stop finding money for their music.
- john (from Magnatune)
I believe Stallman makes a big point of making clear that "open" does not mean "non-commercial". His presentations make a big deal of saying that it's possible to be "free" (as in freedom) and charge money.
When I decided to label Magnatune I used the Open Source Definition http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php as my litmus test, as well as all I'd heard from Stallman.
Except for not providing the musical equivalent of "source code" (ie, the original MIDI and track-by-track breakdown) I believe Magnatune fits that definition of open. I'd like to provide the sources, and will start doing so, once I figure out the technical issues of a common format that people can use.
-john (from Magnatune)
"I found some medieval music I like, but am concerned about how they will handle my CC number. The "buy" link doesn't seem to use SSL."
SSL is there now. I had been waiting until I got my VISA merchant account (about 2 weeks ago) before getting SSL, since before that I was using a 3rd party payment system.
-john (from Magnatune)
"Does anyone know if they plan selling physical CDs? I am still of the old school, want to have the physical media with nice cover etc."
We have a partnership with a British classical label, called Avie, that also splits revenue (not profits) with their artists -- the only artist friendly label of any size we've found.
We plan on releasing the top-selling classical artists on CD, distributed through normal means. Avie is well distributed in the USA, in places such as Tower Records, so that's where you'll find them. Probably, the first few CDs will be in the first quarter of 2004.
-john (from Magnatune)
Naxos is a terrible deal for their musicians. They buy out all the rights to the CD, so that the artist sees and advance for recording their CD, and never any money again. That's one the reasons they've stuck to less-well-known musicians, because they can be exploited.
-john
I have a good amount of classical music from the Ukraine and Russie. Also, about 1/2 of my electronica acts from eastern europe (so much good music there!)
I've had very little luck with spain and south america -- not very web savvy and (so far) paranoid about the web.
Yes, choral music from a church is fine, as long as the performance and recording quality are great.
-john
Unfortunately, almost all Jazz classics were composed after 1923 and so are unavailable to Magnatune.
I've only gotten a few submissions of newly-authored Jazz, none too good yet, sorry!
-john
Believe it or not, the eastern church music sells really well.
My Ukrainian producer who does a lot of those albums is jumping for joy at all the attention his music is getting.
-john
Some REALLY big names in classical have signed up to Magnatune. See Classical - Trevor Pinnock is huge, and I've worshipped Jacob Heringman for years...
-john
Also, mp3.com didn't try to get licensing deals. For some my artists who I can get licensing deals for, there's a lot more money there than selling $8 downloads.
-john
I love the model, I just wish that they had a studio somewhere. I am a musician myself and would love to have some talented studio professionals who also happened to have some ethics.
6 7 :
from http://forums.magnatune.com/read/messages?id=5438
Magnatune acquires portable recording studio
Magnatune has acquired a portable recording studio, and will soon begin recording artists specifically for release on Magnatune.
When under a recording agreement with Magnatune, artists will be able to record an album at no cost to them, Magnatune will distribute and promote the album, and the artist will still own all rights to the recording. For example, the artist will be able to print their own CDs of the recording and sell them at gigs.
Magnatune acquired the recording system so that it would be able to broaden its reach, and include talented artists who don't have the thousands of dollars (at a minimum) it takes to make a typical record studio-recorded album.
For the gear-heads out there, the recording setup comprises of:
- a 17" mac powerbook
- pro tools digital audio workstation software
- digidesign's digi002 8 track recording console
- an additional 8 tracks of recording capacity (16 tracks total)
- a variety of high end "Studio Projects" microphones and stands
- various off-board racks and effects (and software-based ones)
In most cases, it is easiest if the recording happens at our premises in Berkeley, California (it's still a lot of gear to move around), but in some case we will record at a band's performance site
-john (from Magnatune)
The problem wasn't bandwidth but Apache and Squid, which weren't up to the task (even though there was plenty of CPU).
I loaded up another proxy, and AOLServer (www.aolserver.com) to handle graphics, and most of mp3 streaming drop-outs are gone now. However, I will be looking for a higher-load proxy server than squid ("oops" is too unstable on linux for me)
-john
Most musicians who come to me already have a self-released CD, so it's not an issue.
However, I also:
-john
I totally agree -- the 50% that indie labels refer to is always on the *profits*, not on gross sales, so no money ever arrives, because they either a) don't make any money, or b) assign expenses from money-losing acts to the money-making acts, so again there are no profits.
See http://magnatune.com/info/why for my story, about my wife who got one of those deals from an indie label and never saw a penny.
FYI, with Magnatune I give 50% of *gross* sales, with *no* expenses subtracted. That's the "not evil" part...
-john (the Magnatune guy)