Legal Music Trading Group

There are a number of sites providing legal downloads of music which is licensed to encourage copying. Instead of trading tracks from our existing collection of extremely copyrighted CDs and downloads, we each go out trawling the various sites dedicated to freely-tradeable music, find the best of that stuff, and use it to create mix CDs. (I have to give Thorog credit for the original idea of getting a bunch of people to fill up a pre-designated space with MP3 tracks, and then burning the results as CDs and distributing them... possibly for a small fee to cover materials and postage.)

This has the advantage of giving some "ear time" to some seriously overlooked artists and hopefully finding some overlooked tracks, rather than rewarding the monopolistic traditional-license record labels for their possessiveness and unwillingness to change.

It can also be kept legal as it scales up; Magnatune, for example, lets you instantly license tracks for small-quantity reproduction. They also allow you to legally give away three copies of tracks you've purchased. So once the group starts to get to be more than a handful of people, you could purchase a license for any Magnatune tracks you wanted and legally sell the CDs on which you included them, with a small markup to cover burning costs, and of course adding on for shipping costs. (We'd have to see how the economics worked out once we actually had some track selections to get prices for; it may be that Magnatune is charging too much to make the resulting CDs affordable, but it's definitely worth the experimentation to find this out, in my view. Magnatune and others are still largely testing the waters, and I suspect that they'd be very interested in hearing our feedback.)

Once you get to the point of having a handful of handfuls of people, it starts becoming worthwhile to set up a web site to help people find groups with similar tastes. It can start simply, however, with just a few people in a chat room agreeing to participate, with no formal structure needed.

related idea from 2003

from an email I sent to Brian B. on 2003-01-20

The problem with internet radio as it is now (legal issues aside) is twofold:

1. It ties up your bandwidth (especially for those of us using dial-up, but even with cable or DSL it can be a struggle)

2. The quality sucks

WHAT IF...

(By mutual consent between the netcaster and the copyright holder thus bypassing existing royalty laws, which would seem to be a key part of The GnuMusiq Model) (Did I mention that I got the domain gnumusiq.com?)

...you could run an application which would, when your computer and internet connection were otherwise largely idle, download high-quality MP3s of a given "station"s programming for later playback either on your computer or on an MP3 player?

Without getting too technical, it looks like at _really_ high quality (Xing VBR-hi), it would be pretty easy to get a little over half an hour of programming by downloading overnight. With a little sacrifice of quality (but not nearly as much as required for streaming, and doubtless unnoticeable to many listeners -- and remember, FM quality never was CD quality), plus additional downloading during the day, it should be possible to extend this many times over. (Or possibly we could use another encoding scheme such as VQF, which delivers similar quality with significantly smaller files.)

Given this arrangement, several additional possibilities suggest themselves.

The downloader app could be configured to make it difficult to "split off" individual songs (into separate MP3s or WAVs) without permission from the artist -- e.g. if the listener had paid for that right for that song -- assuming that is something we would want to limit. (My inclination would be rather that each song should be accompanied by an "audio trademark" as discussed earlier, identifying the source at least by artist and artist's URL, possibly also by album and song title, with free copying of the song+trademark encouraged and revenue generated at the website by a number of means. The downloader app could include a player which would make it easy to find the artist's web site and buy merch or sponsorships or whatever...)

The downloader app could also aid with the downloading of purchased CD-quality MP3s (or VQFs or even WAVs, according to taste) unencumbered by audio trademarks or whatever else we put in the "free" version to encourage purchasing of the non-free version.

I don't know how anyone else would receive this, but if it were available right now I'd install that sucker and start downloading some radio tonight. (Half an hour per day might be all I'd have time to listen to anyhow.) I'd also have no hesitation about submitting all my original recordings. (Then again, I'm probably not in the same position as a working band; my recordings are not being heard, much less generating any revenue, as they are.)

(Another thought which arrived while I was finishing up this email: I think many people (fans) would pay for the privilege of having their name -- just their name, or their business's name; no "plugs" or other advertising -- on a band's web site, prominently displayed but not necessarily on the home page; more like a separate sponsorship page, with nice layout. Like sponsoring the little league or NPR or a museum or something... More popular bands would get bigger sponsors; sponsors could pay different amounts for different font sizes, additional graphics...)

Thoughts? Comments? Bueller? Bueller?