Magnatune

A few weeks ago I saw Magnatune.com owner John Buckner on The Screen Savers on TechTV. It wasn't the first time I had heard of Magnatune, but I hadn't paid much attention. I kinda tune out when most people talk about music industry revolutions these days. But I listen to The Screen Savers. It was more interesting than I had originally thought. The concept is basically "shareware music". People can download 128k (i think) MP3s from artists and decide then if they want to pay to download high quality .WAV versions of the songs/albums.

I FTP'd them my I Don't Know What I'm Doing album MP3s last week for the heck of it and they wrote back today saying they'd like me to join Magnatune. I now have some forms here to fill out and send in if I so desire.

I basically have no idea if this is a good idea or not. It's apparently non-exclusive so I believe I can keep on doing what I want here, but that it will provide a service I would very much like to have: if a visitor decides they'd like to buy a high quality version of my album (or songs from it) they'll be able to do that through Magnatune and download it from them. Thereby removing my manual CD-burning, labelling and mailing labor from the picture, which would be certainly all right by me. For that it seems worth it.

I'm really interested and also terrified to see what happens! Hooray!