ANOTHER WAY

The heaviest odds facing down the development of an indie online music distributor, of course, is that although the all-through-the-net model should make it easy for people to leap from source to source - everything is a click and a mouse gesture away - in practice, people tend to find a service and stick with it. But, for the adventurous, welcome Indieburn, a peer to peer network offering DRM free, paid-for downloads. Their aim is to help develop and feed artists - the musician gets fifty percent of all cash made from the selling of their music, which is great.

We do have concerns - they're trying to force people to buy full albums in one go (the pricing structure - a hefty four bucks for an ep against eight dollars for an album) points in this direction, but that's looking for quite a hefty cash commitment for a roster of artists who are unknown. It doesn't exactly encourage sampling. We know that it pains artists to think that people might want to choose just a couple of songs from them, and that they should be thinking of forty cents a pop max, but the longterm rewards in extra sales would probably soothe their brusied egos a little.

It's a good step in the right direction, but it's still making the big mistake of the majors - trying to impose the real world pattern of albums and eps onto a delivery service best suited for individual tracks. That it's being run by a former major label exec comes as no surprise.
[Tip of the hat to Tiny Mix Tapes]

music downloads