I discovered an interesting little site recently called Magnatune. It’s a place where you can buy (legally!) music online. As is typical with these types of sites, you can listen to a streamed version of the music you’re considering buying before actually plunking down any money.
The interesting thing about it is it’s pricing model. Instead of having a fixed cost for an album, you can choose to pay anywhere from $5.00 to $18.00 for any album, with the recommended price being $8.00. A full 50% of whatever you pay goes directly to the artist with the store keeping the other half.
When buying, you can choose either to buy a download or a CD (which also allows you to download the songs immediately; you’ll recieve the CD later in the mail). The choice of download is in a variety of formats, from MP3, OGG, FLAC, ACC, and plain ‘ol WAV and contain no copy protection. If you elect to buy the CD, there is an additonal $4.97 shipping and handling fee.
Music selction is basically what you’d think it is: mostly indie bands with fair to good musical talent. There are a few gems hidden in there, however. If you’re looking for the latest Brittany Spears or other Craptacular album, you’ll have to go to iTunes.
Another thing impressed me about the store is how open the creator is about his buiness; he has a blog where he discusses the buiness with surprising frankness. Lots of interesting information can be gleaned from here: despite only needing to pay $5.00, most people end up paying more and the average amount paid is $8.20 (just over the recommended price).
So, if you have $5.00, $8.00, or $10.00 to spend (the most popular payment options) and are looking to give some starving musicians a much-needed meal, give the site a look.
Another site with an indie selection (with a different price model, but no nasty DRM) is http://www.commontunes.org/
To be fair, iTunes does have a decent indie selection, and is one way for those artists to make some money (though they may receive far less per song than on something like Mangatune, the exposure is far greater on iTunes.) However, the iTunes crippling is really irritating. I own an iPod, and I have problems doing what I want with my music, and I can go ahead and share the songs if I want to regardless. I also know that there are lots of artists whose record label are signed with iTunes, so the artist’s songs are listed there, but don’t want any DRM on their music. They don’t get a choice in the matter, so just have to complain about it on their bandblogs.
Someday our culture will shift so that services like Mangatune are the accepted norm, but for now, iTunes (a billion songs sold) is here to stay.
While this site is fantastic, I use a different site. I don’t know if any of you have heard of it or not. http://www.allofmp3.com is a fantastic site. You pay anywhere $1-$3 per album, the only thing that is bad is that it’s prepay. Though if you are into downloading a lot of music it’s ok. The commpany is not located in the states however. It is perfectly legal and has a very convenient downloadable search tool, which cuts down on bandwidth as you are not directly accessing the site with 100’s of other people at the same time. It took roughly 30-60 sec per song and very user friendly. If you have yet to get a music download site, I recommend allofmp3.