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Magnatune
February 26, 2004

Check out Magnatune. Berkeley-based Magnatune calls its approach "open music," the musical equivalent of shareware or "open source". The idea being to let users try music before they buy, and when they do, half of every sale goes to the artist.

Magnatune's motto is "We are not evil."

Every track in Magnatune's artist catalog is available through online radio stations and streaming MP3 feeds. Listeners can download, swap and re-mix songs too. Magnatune distributes song files under a "some rights reserved" license from Creative Commons. Magnatune makes its money from licensing deals and sales of high-quality music files [both MP3s and CD-quality WAV files].

Buyers can choose to pay anywhere from $5 to $18 an album. Licensing also works on a sliding scale. For example a song for your wedding video might cost $5; the same song for the opening credits of a $5 million feature film with worldwide distribution could be $2,600.

The Magnatune website launched in May 2003 and traffic has risen from 1,000 visitors a day to a peak of 25,000. The website now brings in $15,000 to $20,000 a month, 80 percent of it from downloads, the remaining 20 percent from licensing deals. [figures quoted from Wired News Oct 03]

Categories: Music, Web

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