The Pledge: eMusic

[tarmle]

Ars Technica is running an article on the eMusic subscription service that offers downloads of non-DRM VBR mp3s. Their catalogue is primarily indie bands and music from "beyond the commercial mainstream", though AT point out that "bands found on the site account for almost 30 percent of sales in the US music market."

The majors are terrified of

Comments

[tarmle]

This is interesting. It sounds like one of the proposals on the table for reform in France. I find the idea has a certain degree of socialistic appeal although I'd really want to see the proposed implementation before I pass judgement.

I actually considered mentioning a system like this in the Good Guys Win but chickened out at the last minute and went with the sponsor model instead. The concept was for a "Karmaright Network" in which everyone and everything has a karma-node with, say, 100 points that they could distribute to other nodes as they please. A node that receives more points has greater 'authority' and so the points that they distribute are worth more and this allows artists to reward those whose work they have built on. In the 'flat fee' model this information could be used to decide the distribution of the resultant fund to the artists on a monthly basis. This rather more democratic method does away with download monitoring that may be accidentally bypassed through p2p, physical sharing, or darknets, instead people

[tarmle]

Yeah, that sounds like me - in 2001 I was still running Win95 on the PC I bought back in '96 with 32Mb RAM and 1Gb HD. And yet today my traditional stereo (a 'portable' Panasonic with bells and whistles) spends all it's time tucked into the back of a cupboard along with a small box of steadily degrading audio cassettes