[ale] OT: The old mp3.com

[Chris Ricker]

On Fri, 10 Jun 2005, aaron wrote:

> And then there are also music distribution sites using Public Commons 
> licensing. Michael Hirsch pointed me to MagnaTune a few months back...
> <http://magnatune.com/>
> 
> The slogan next to their logo is "we are not evil" :-)
> 
> A lot of the material here is very unique and innovative, and free to listen 
> to on stream.

John Buckman, the Magnatune founder, gave one of the keynotes at the Red 
Hat Summit last week. One of the things he said that I thought was 
interesting: when you buy an album on Magnatune, you can set the price 
(it's a drop-down selection box of values between $5 and $18), with the 
default price set to $8. I forget what the exact value was, but the 
average amount actually paid per album downloaded is somewhat greater than 
$8. Evidently when people know that 50% of the price goes straight to the 
artist (and when they can download in whatever format they want, from 
lo-fi MP3 up to CD-quality wav / FLAC) they're willing to pay more than is 
asked for....

later,
chris