New Music Stores
I'm trying out two new (to me) music stores.
All music on Jamendo is free to download and licensed through one of several Creative Commons licenses or the Free Art Licence, making it legal to copy and share, as well as to modify and make commercial use of for some, depending on the licence. Jamendo allows streaming of all of its thousands of albums in either Ogg Vorbis or MP3 format, and downloads through the BitTorrent and eDonkey networks. (via Wikipedia)
I had tried to join Jamendo a while back but the "Jamuploader" software "jammed up" and "crashed my computer". It worked this time and my album is here. Nothing in particular has happened since then. It's a very creative commons friendly site and I've received a strange amount of email mentioning this site so I thought it'd be worth checking out.
Amie Street is an online music store and social network service created in 2006 by Brown seniors in Providence, Rhode Island. Based on a demand algorithm to determine song prices, artists upload music onto the site to allow users to purchase it for whatever price the song is currently listed at. Users can also earn credit by recommending ("REC") songs to their friends. If the REC was for a good song and leads to users purchasing it, the price of the song will increase. The user will earn credit based on the increase in the price of the song after making the REC. (via Wikipedia)
I like the idea of this one though whether it will work in practice should be interesting. My page is here. Songs start free but user recommendations drive the prices up and the users who recommended the songs get kickbacks.
So far there have already been a bunch of reviews of my music and the cost of my song Fixing My Brain has rocketed up to 7 cents.
One catch: looking at the album info I see that Fixing My Brain's revenue is currently at $0.19 and there's a "storage fee remaining" of $4.81. So I guess you have to pay Amie Street five dollars before you can make any money on each individual song (which is $60 total for a 12 track album). I'd assume at such low prices very few artists pay off the storage fee (at 7 cents I'll have to sell 71 copies of Fixing My Brain to pay off its storage fee) so each semi-failed song is money right into Amie Street's pockets. I'm not sure if they take a cut after the $5 has been paid.