Other Online Opportunities for Independent Musicians? 8
"A tool like Mojo Nation won't work quite as well, since we rely on the web to do our advertising -- unless a cgi or java front-end exists for it. And other audio hosting sites such as Java Music and Ampcast seem likely to feel the same financial crunch that MP3.com has.
Much of these recent changes were expected with the Vivendi buy-out. But it's clear that the business model wasn't working, either. MP3.com has to face overhead and has to get its money from somewhere. It can't just serve up MP3's for free to everyone.
It seems to me that the best way to go would be some method whereby listeners can try music before they pay for it, and when they do pay, can do so conveniently and without having to pay very much. I know that most artists would be able to do very well for themselves with as little as a nickel per download. Would you be willing to pay that much? What would be a convenient way to pay that you would feel is secure and private?"
MP3.COM goes down the tubes (Score:3, Informative)
AngryCoffee [angrycoffee.com] doesn't pay anything, but it's free and cool.
I'm extremely disappointed with MP3.Com, though. Every time they change their policies they get suckier.
Music Rules! (Score:2, Insightful)
so lets see... (Score:1)
of course, i can also see the other side. somehow mp3.com has to continue making money. they are a corporation after all. oh well...
back to downloading free music (legally? hehehe.)
French alternative ! (Score:1)
mp3.com is crap... (Score:1)
Supply and Demand... (Score:1)
If you want to write bad songs and put them online, that's fine. But expecting to make a noticable amount of money off of it is unlikely. Just because MP3.com was willing to pay more people more money than they deserved for so long doesn't make it a crime to stop doing it.
Maybe Audiogalaxy? (Score:1)
I'm not sure it's quite as robust as what you're looking for, but I thought I'd mention it. Also, Audiogalaxy seems to be on the record companies' radars lately, but I'm hoping that their musician hosting might help keep them afloat.
Web distribution vs. P2P w/external metadata (Score:1)
In any case, I almost never download more than two songs of an artist through mp3.com or similar sites. The click-click-click-click for each song interfaces are a pain. If I find I like a band I'll do quite a bit of searching on gnutella et al before I tediously download from mp3.com.
The search/select/download interface that all P2P filesharing clients more or less have is just much more convenient. KaZaa/MusicCity and various gnutella clients are a pleasure to use.
The pain of downloading from the web might be worth it if the download web site actually contained a wealth of ancilliary information that placed the tracks in context, but it almost never does. Certainly not mp3.com artist sites. A low quality image and occasionally a silly description doesn't do it.
I do have a solution, which means I'm horribly biased. :-) P2P distribution is the way to go: low cost, high usability. An external metadata catalog is the way to get context: find out more about the files you've downloaded or are considering downloading, whether there are better versions available, the artist's web site, etc.
An external metadata catalog can also provide a near universal point of reintermediation, connecting the artist/publisher with the listener regardless of where the latter obtained the file -- a file metadata catalog can be keyed by a deterministic calculated file identifier, so that if two people have the same file, they get the same catalog record, and can interact with each other, and with the file's creator.
To get a hint of what I'm talking about, check out Bitzi [bitzi.com]. It's targeted at developers right now, but if you're a super smart creator/publisher you should be able to figure out where we're going. If you're aren't that smart (just kidding, if you can't figure it out it's our fault), I'd be happy to explain.