But I think the author oversimplifying a bit. Sure it's technically easy to sell music online. The stuff that's hard to come by is people's attention.

And while it's true that the Internet lowers distribution barriers, it has also decreased the perceived value of music recordings. Because access has gotten so much easier, people tend to think of music less as something you can own, but rather of something you have access to, be it through MP3s on your hard drive or streaming. We at Popcuts set out to address that. Because we think there's a deeper sense of ownership possible than simply having access to a sound file. And we do think music should have a price tag.

Our site is based on the idea that buyers of a song get a share of the revenue that song makes in the future. So when you buy a song on Popcuts, it's in your interest that that song does well. You might tell your friends about it, but you probably won't seed the file to a BitTorrent site. In addition, we try to reward the behavior that a lot of music fans already show: They know of a hot new band before everyone else, and they want to show it off. </selfpromotion>

The huge and fatal flaw in that idea is that as soon as word gets around that people have a profit motive to recommend songs from PopCuts, and it will, then any such recommendation becomes suspect. Would you buy a song on the recommendation of someone who you knew was getting a commission for recommending that song? Of course not.

Wishful thinking about human nature, I think. Ain't gonna work. People are ultra-sensitive to that kind of thing.

But you know what, I don't think anything is going to work. Chalk me up in the camp that thinks there are basically two options now for music sales: compulsory licensing (ie, $10/month pass to absolutely everything), or no sales at all.

I think the music industry has a year or two to implement the first option. If they don't, Oink 2* will be born, decentralised, completely P2P and un-shutdownable, and then the age of paying for sound recordings of any type will come to an end forever.

* Oink was a huge BitTorrent site which was basically the best music resource in the world.

Yet advertising still works...

I think their scheme is actually pretty clever. First off, you assume that if people out to make money are willing to "invest" in a song, they are assuming that it's good enough that other people will actually buy the song. Secondly, if you buy the song, you can also make money from it.

The really interesting part will be when someone decides that they want to see how well they can game this system as an investor, especially using some quantitative analysis tools, tracking other high earners, etc. This is mostly assuming that they switch to cash credit vs store credit.

I suppose this is true, if your business model is selling music to people who don't pay money for music. It is also true in software, if your business model is selling software to people who don't pay money for software.

I generally recommend selling software to people who pay money for software. It is probably good advice for music, too. (These people exist! Step away from the techy cocoon and you will meet a whole world full of all types of interesting people. Many of them have strange habits like working from 9 to 5, routinely paying money for goods and services, and using weird non-electronic implements to cause glyphs to appear on paper -- which they sometimes even use for paying for goods and services!)

Maybe it's a more nuanced appreciation of intellectual property rights, or more obscure musical tastes, or wealth, or insistence on the best possible bit rate - I don't know. But I'm telling the truth here.

It's the non techies who don't care about quality and just like the top 40 that do not buy music. All it takes is one person to teach them about BT or - for the real novices - iMeem. I know teenagers whose "music collection" is a collection of links to iMeem songs. I don't know how or why they put up with it, but they do.

This ideal music consumer, who dutifully pays $1/file from iTunes, is in the minority and I'm honestly surprised there are so many even now. You simply cannot stop people sharing 3-5MB files in the age of BT and broadband. It is only going to get easier. In my opinion, the whole model is utterly doomed.

I'm no pirate, but I hope the music industry takes its sweet time.

Radiohead did this because they'd already been successful in the past, that's why fans were willing to pay for their music even if it was given away. It might work for a new band, but if ALL bands are on equal footing, I don't think the income will be as high per band.

I could be wrong though.

That's not necessarily a good thing. It emphasizes musicians who are energetic over musicians who favor craftsmanship. If that's where money came from, we'd never have had latter Beatles, or nearly any classical music.

Hopefully a model is found which lets people make money from sales. Otherwise, music's going to keep plummeting down.

Sorry to repeat myself but the core problem here is bigger than just "people not paying for music". There are many other sectors facing this, perhaps most notably quality journalism. Good news reporting is hard and requires a lot of effort and resources. And the number of people willing to pay for news shrinks daily. Sound familiar?

The core problem is the disconnect between the material and the information worlds in terms of scarcity. Simply put, scarcity exists in the former but not the latter. This leaves anyone relying on scarcity in the latter to generate leverage against the former in a bad position.

This trend is inevitable and, while it might not seem like it right now, good, I believe. Obviously, the best outcome is for popularity to be its own reward - you can see the seeds of this in the open source movement, but it exists elsewhere as well. Social standing is a genuine motivating factor. Absent material necessity, I believe it would be enough.

Still, here we are in a world where we still have to pay actual money for our rent and food. We need a stopgap measure. Elsewhere I've proposed that governments establish "patronage funds" for artists, distributed by popularity. Basically take 1% of revenue and distribute it to artists/authors according to (reliable) measures of how useful their population finds them. In the current economic climate, however, this kind of idea is kind of unlikely.

It's a problem that needs to be solved, though, and it will be solved, somehow.

You mention open source, which is a perfect example. Open source projects are rarely good. Firefox is perhaps the fourth best browser on the market, after Chrome, Opera, and Safari. OpenOffice is terrible. They're popular because most people lack enough knowledge of usability to understand just how bad they are, but they're not very good. At most they're functional.

Patronage does not work in the public sector. That's what private sectors are best for, actually: the people with money to pay for musicians are much more likely to have good taste in what they become patrons of. That suddenly makes it a matter of personal taste, which is a more effective model than relying on the masses, who are almost universally wrong in their choices.

I sound like an old man.

It has a huge incentive for users to behave (I wonder if this would work for HN too):

+ registration is for free, but you need someone to invite you.

+ if you do something that causes you to get banned, the person who invited you gets banned, too. Makes people think a few times before doing something stupid.

The real Oink 2 will be a properly indexed distributed web of trust system using something like BT/freenet and DHT and some kind of reputation system. There are early implementations going in that direction, but nothing really working yet. It's absolutely possible, though. All of the components are right there, just waiting to be linked up.

It's ridiculous to think this isn't coming. It's hard, yes, but it's also inevitable. Any business model that depends on people not being able to easily find and download small files, like say audio or even video these days, is screwed in maybe 2 or 3 years.

I don't think I'm predicting the future here, I think I'm stating the obvious. Hell, I have a side project along these lines, and I'm very far from the only one. Everyone wants something like this. It's just a matter of time.

Of course not? How so?

I don't usually care what the motive is if I can determine the veracity of the information. For example, there are many people who blog about books, with an affiliate-tagged link to Amazon. (I do that myself.) I know they are getting a cut, but a) it does not change the price I pay, and b) if I trust their judgment I'm more interested in getting a good book than spiting someone out of some loose change.

Besides, I take all reviews with a grain of salt, and if I do not know the reviewer I consider possible ulterior motives (financial or otherwise).

Basically, everything on the Web is suspect until shown otherwise. People still find the means to establish trust and reputation and act on shared information.

Would I buy a song on your recommendation alone? No. Would I buy a song that I enjoy that you've recommended, knowing that you get a commission? Of course, why not?

However, I think there is a real decrease in the real value of music recordings. While the internet does cheaply connect fans with musicians in widely different geographical regions, overall the supply of music has gone way up. Why should I pay one band for music when there's another band, just as good, giving away their music for free one click away?

While Zed has excellent points, here are somethings I find kinda moot

"Even if these companies open things up for musicians to sell their music, you’d still be stuck at having to sell through another company that doesn’t really add value." I don't think this is entirely true. The company is giving you a distribution channel, helping you accept payments and lots of other things in general. The very popular musicians with a dedicated following may be able to sell on their sites easily but I am not sure about the other 90%. I think these companies provide a lot of value to them

* They don’t ask you to prove you’re the author or that you’re “signed”. I agree about the signed part but I don't think its a good idea for the sites to allow people to sell whatever they put up and assume they are not selling someone else's stuff.

Another problem that I have certainly seen in places like India is the fact that bands really crave for an audience and give out their music for free a lot of times. The same music is also available for purchase on some other sites. I feel thats cheating the guy who is buying music. He should know that he can get the same music for free elsewhere and then pay if he wants to. I think this is where the companies providing such services will have a lot of overhead and they do need to take a cut out of the sales.

That iteration of mp3.com's business model didn't survive, but I really think that has more to do with the power of major labels and existing distribution/sales channels. In my opinion, it's hard for Band X to make it as an indie artist without the backing of a major label's marketing budget and arrangements with Apple, Amazon, Walmart, etc.

AmieStreet is a really great experience, for the fan. I cannot testify as to the experience for the musician. I could see not being able to set your own price point as annoying. Artists do keep 70% of the proceeds after $5 (so, AmieStreet is still a middle man), paid quarterly.

AmieStreet's Wikipedia entry is short but interesting. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amie_Street#cite_note-ForArtist...)

I have not used PopCuts, but I'm checking it out now.

EDIT: For the record, I have no affiliation with AmieStreet, other than being a user. I do have a bit of an infatuation, though.

(Perhaps something like muxtape.com? Though Zed marked it as a site found wanting, I'd say there's a chance it moves to letting musicians sell their music directly, considering the people involved with its direction now.)

The music must speak for its self eventually... why not immediately?

The information is poorly organized and lacks a logical makeup. The name of a song is only slightly bigger than the information line, and it's all a single line so right now I'm seeing one artist name broken up into two lines, which is ugly. The list of "trendsetters" list people who haven't made much money, which discourages me if I'm going to sign up.

That gradient is awful - it's both imprecise and bland, and serves no purpose. (With gradients, there's got to be a very specific purpose to including one. If you're doing it just to decorate your background, keeping it tight and not leaking it onto the content is essential.)

The color scheme of "red, white, and gray" doesn't appeal to me in the slightest. That dark red looks poor for links, and it makes it look like link color was selected just to so that the default color couldn't be blue. (I prefer blue links to that bland state of red.) The underline style is just an underline, which is also unexciting. These things are all design choices! With every single aspect of the site you're making you've got a choice to make something that's exciting and appealing, or you can choose to follow status quo, but if you do that's bad design.

When I visit a web site that sells music and the first thing it says to me is "Buy a song, get paid every time it sells again," the message is that I should buy music not for the joy of music but for the sake of making money. That's the big scheme here. From the customer point of view, that's the model, and that's shit. Compare that to Amie Street: "The best place to discover new music." Still not perfect - I have a lot of complaints about Amie Street as well - but at least it sets up the idea that music should be special.

The "Trendsetters" system enforces this. THe best users are the ones who have made the most money from picking popular bands. From the user perspective this makes sense. From the artist perspective, I'm going to tell the person who thought this was a good place for me to sell my pride and joy to shove it. Next to that, the "recent events" showing reveals one users, "lalas1", giving a lot of albums 5 stars and telling them all "i pre oredered your new album! love your music, im a big fan!". My initial reactions are: "That's a silly username," "This person's a mindless groupie," and "This place chooses to highlight spam and senseless communication," all of which are things that turn me away.

The thing that bewilders me is that Popcuts has a good visual point of reference: every album has album art. This has been done before, with Coverflow and with the iTunes store and with the iTunes screensaver on the Mac (which looks gorgeous). When you're asking yourself how to design a music site, you've got three basic elements to choose from: you can try and create a music-driven layout, like Muxtape's (where every line plays a band's song); you can use a graphical approach, which looks inviting; or you can go the text-only approach, which is cluttered and conveys no emotion whatsoever unless you focus hard on typography - dark red helvetica in this case does not appeal to my sensibilities at all.

There's nothing unique on the page. I keep having to skip back over to it because I can't keep the design in mind past one or two critique points. The top bar looks generic. The search bar stands out, but only because it is too small. The fieldsets are used twice a page, which means they're no longer outlining anything interesting and eyecatching and look essentially like tables. The bottom line of links looks essentially the same as every other site. The color scheme is forgettable, there is no grid in place, things don't align.

If I were a musician worth anything at all, and it's my goal to be worth something one day, I would require a web site that respects itself enough to look good. There's a difference between minimalism and bland.

The music must speak for its self eventually... why not immediately?

Because here, the music DOESN'T speak for itself. The web site's design does. It says "I'm ugly and plan, and I'm not organized, and I use a generic free flash player for my music, and the second-biggest number on the page tells people how much money they'll make back after buying my CD. That's the information the site I've chosen to express myself has deemed most important."

There's a difference between a site being ugly and a site getting out of the way. The best site for art is one that you don't notice. Then the music does speak for itself. In this case, the web site speaks first, and it has an irritating voice.

That gradient is awful ... With gradients, there's got to be a very specific purpose to including one. If you're doing it just to decorate your background, keeping it tight and not leaking it onto the content is essential.

The gradient is not the greatest, sure. I don't agree that gradients are a design element that can apparently only be used with the precision of a laser though. I have previously included gradients on a design just because I felt like it. Sometimes the best designs come from what you feel like adding, that's what makes a portion of it art. The design in question turned out fine and was complimented by friends and strangers alike. I do agree that you need to be careful if the gradient is going to sit behind actual content, but do not think that there is some kind of unbreakable design rule that states that gradients cannot sit behind actual content. I don't like when the end of a gradient does not blend fluidly into the background colour however, that does look cheap.

The other design criticisms you mention are coming from your own subjective taste. Nothing wrong with that, but I won't comment on this subjective opinion.

The points you make about the site seemingly highlighting the money over the music I think are valid... From my point of view being a person with no connection to managing the site whatsoever. But I suspect I would feel differently otherwise.

Perhaps if I used the site more, I would be more annoyed with it, but visiting a few times and just clicking around, I don't seem to have as much of a problem with it as you do. But at the same time, I haven't bought any music... Maybe that says something too.

The theory behind it is worth much more than the current lack of presentation.

The theory is good, but where art's concerned the form is concerned entirely with the function. Things like showing me a feed of activity doesn't particularly inspire me, and it doesn't make me see enthusiastic about the music being sold along that feed.

I think they're doing a great thing: I'd like to see an open model get huge. Right now it's lacking.

(As a counterexample regarding site design: when I saw the new Muxtape for the first time I began mentally planning an album's worth of music, because I thought Muxtape was so lovely that having a band to be on the platform was something I wanted. Beautiful design attracts beautiful things.

I'm sure they'll eventually run into gaming issues, if they ever care (after all they'll be raking in the cash on every purchase).

Great way to think of music distribution in a totally new way. I hope this catches on, since it may actually be a replacement for the current model that might actually work for everyone's benefit.

If only someone at the labels actually wanted to be productive...

As a EDM fan you want to know what track is playing, so you can come back to it on a later day and listen to it again. Or perhaps you want to buy the song you are listening to on a set/podcast. What we have done on Mugasha is built a player that streams these long (1-2 hours) podcasts on-demand and allows the user to listen to them as if the set was an album.

Embdeeded in the track listing for each set is a buy button (through amazon [iTunes and Beatport](coming soon). We are partnering with Bandsintown to provide live event(tickets) information for the artists that you are listening to i the set. This is not the best way to monetize (for us), but it is great for the artist (thats the goal). We are here to promote EDM in a more effective way and make it easier for users to enjoy this kind of music, as well as for them to easily buy and support the artist.

So if you like dance(including trance) music, please check out Mugasha.

I really like what you guys have done with the interface, and have a fairly good selection of sets. I think the biggest problems are portability and integration. Whenever I'm listening to a streaming set through a browser, I inevitably tap the "pause" media key on my keyboard out of habit, setting off a nice random mix of streaming audio and whatever happens to be cued up in iTunes. I also tend to download sets to my iPhone and listen to them in car.

I wonder if down the road you could address the portability issue with a iPhone app that mimics your site's UI, and the integration by providing custom streams to iTunes (or winamp, or whatever) that include tracknames in the stream.

Do you have any plans to support user-submitted DJ sets?

Our whole philosophy behind mugasha is accessibility and portability. So Mobile apps including streaming iPhone app are next steps. Our main focus right now is to get licensing worked out so we are in the green area.

Keep watching our blog and/or @mugasha. or find me on IM if you want to chat more. dodeja - gmail.com

also, one purpose of the "gatekeeper" is to ensure a very minimal level of quality... not the best approach but one that is used often in retail... exceptions are sites like youtube and zazzle...

Incidentally, my startup is all about solving this problem by disengaging the license from the file. Let's see if it works. I have to get it built first.

In terms of paying the middleman to be on sites like Amazon and iTunes -- this is really just based on the policies of those stores. They make you go through a middleman because they don't want to deal with artists directly. Because of this, someone has to track royalties, encode the tracks in proprietary formats etc, which does incur a bit of work, which is why they are all fee-based.

http://www.jamroom.net

We've been selling and supporting Jamroom for over 5 years - it really began as an alternate to mp3.com, but has taken off from there.

Too bad we got rejected. =(

That seems a bit of a silly thing to say to this crowd, many of whom have built bigger things than this article describes without any funding or support.

Go build version one this weekend, launch it on Monday and report back here so we can give you some feedback!

On the other hand, we do have to compete against both SoundCloud.com and BandCamp.com, both of which accomplish some/most of our idea.

Its should be an interesting year for music.

I can see them flooding the site with copyrighted music and then suing the site in court for copyright violations, putting demands that music gets screened for copyright, etc.

That will drive up the costs to a point where it's not profitable anymore.

That is unless there's technology available that can accurately screen any uploads for copyright violations.

That's the most important part. There's a lot of stuff that should be made quicker and easier by the Internet, but nope, there's still the middle man waiting to delay the process and make some cash.