I was going to leave a comment at Lucas Gonze's weblog, but I may as well use trackback and hope he sees this. Lucas posted a follow-up to his "whine that policing unauthorized music on Webjay is turning into a huge drag". He is considering a form of community moderation (suggested by Seb Paquet). I thought "Jim" left an interesting comment in response to this. The last thing he said was:
"Of course, with webjay, there is a more black-and-white issue. Is the material obviously illegal or not?"
This touches on what I wrote the other day about not being able to link to Lucid 3 and other New Zealand music using WebJay. Following on from Jim's query, I'm wondering how much of popular music is available free online? For example, if I wanted to create a playlist of my favorite songs in the Billboard Top 100 this week, how many of those songs would be available to me as free links? Anyone know an estimate?
How about more 'niche' music - like for example New Zealand music? It would be really interesting to find out what is the ratio of free linkable songs (which I hereby christen with the acronym FLS) to songs you have to pay to listen to, for each genre of music. Does bluegrass for example have a higher FLS ratio than blues? The higher the FLS (Free Linkable Songs) ratio, the better.
Comments
Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all Read/WriteWeb posts
You might look at the lineup at http://magnatune.com/ to get a feel for that. I think in general, the least the commercial potential the freer the MP3s.
Posted by: Seb | June 21, 2004 6:30 AM
/me nods.
I wonder about a different measure than the Billboard Top 100s or other things oriented towards hard media sales and terrestrial radio. I'd want to know what percentage of real listener hours free linkable songs occupy.
Posted by: Lucas | June 21, 2004 11:51 AM
I think the genre charts of the RIAA Radar work very well as a indie-genre barometer. If you look at, say, children's music, you will see that the top 10 sellers are a mix of RIAA/non-RIAA, whereas the pop genre is all RIAA releases... you could look at the top 10 RIAA-free albums and check their salesranks on Amazon and see which genre's average out higher.
Posted by: Ben | June 21, 2004 2:25 PM
Ohh, great links Seb and Ben. I'll check those out!
I'll ponder some more on all these comments too. Thanks :-)
Posted by: Richard MacManus | June 21, 2004 4:38 PM