music 2.0
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The New Magnatune: $5 to $10 for a Month of Unlimited Music
Successful Creative Commons music store Magnatune announced today that they have made another radical transformation in their business model. Customers can now pay as little as $5 per month for unlimited streaming and $10 per month for unlimited DRM-free downloads, they can purchase as little as 1 month of membership and they can use Paypal's recurring payments feature to stay subscribed if they wish. The company, whose motto is "we are not evil," then gives 50% of revenues to the artists.
We really like what Magnatune is doing and we think this business model is great, but we're concerned that the service is still too antiquated in its music delivery to get customers beyond the fact that it has a really obscure catalog.
Mufin: Better Music Recommendations through Algorithms?
Music discovery is clearly a hot topic these days, with large companies like Apple and Microsoft competing with smaller services like imeem, Pandora, and Last.fm. With the exception of Pandora, these services typically rely on the listening habits and recommendations of other users.
Mufin.com, however, which launched today, uses a fully automated system that only takes the actual sounds of a song into consideration. In our tests, Mufin often returned good results, but the fact that it doesn't take genres or the quality of a song into account can make for a frustrating experience at times.
Digital Music Distribution: Weird Al and Kid Rock Take Different Paths
Earlier this week, parody musician Weird Al Yankovic announced that he would start releasing songs on iTunes right after he finishes them, bypassing the standard album model for a faster and more flexible approach. It looks like Yankovic made a deal with Apple, as iTunes will have exclusive rights to these new songs for the first two weeks. The first of these new songs will be available on October 7. Kid Rock, on the other hand, will now allow Rhapsody to carry his music, but does not allow a la carte downloading of his songs.
Muxtape Is Dead - Favtape Emerges as a Great Alternative
While Muxtape's Justin Ouellette just posted a dire story about the shutdown of the popular mixtape service and his dealings with the music industry, Favtape has updated its service dramatically.
Muxtape will effectively remain closed for the general public and will only return as a music hosting service for bands. Favtape, on the other hand, now looks like Muxtape on steroids, with embeddable playlists, album art, integrated YouTube search, a shuffle mode, and the ability to create tapes based on your last.fm and Pandora bookmarks.
Fairtilizer Launches Next-Gen Music Company
Fairtilizer isn't a record company - it's a new music company. What's the difference? A record company is about owning the rights to music and establishes an employer/employee relationship with the artists. A music company, on the other hand, is about having artists establish a relationship with a service. At Fairtilizer, they believe the services they provide will establish them as the "music company" of the future.
This week, Fairtilizer has launched the first part of their new distribution platform: an embeddable player which allows indie artists to share their music anywhere on the net from web sites to blogs to social networks.
MixMatchMusic Helps Indie Artists Get Paid
MixMatchMusic is a new music community whose goal is to cater to the long tail of content creators. Although the concept of an online community for musicians is not new - we've covered several here in the past including Imeem, The Filter, and Rifflet - MixMatchMusic is different because it's trying to solve the biggest problem facing the music industry today: helping artists, especially indie artists, get paid for the music they create.
Last.fm Wants to be Bigger in Japan
The popular UK-based music streaming and discovery service Last.fm announced that it has expanded its on-demand listening and streaming radio services on the Japanese version of the site with content from Universal Music, IODA, The Orchard, and CD Baby. According to Last.fm, this means that its Japanese outpost now has close to 3.5 million tracks available on its streaming radio service, which makes it the largest free streaming music service in the country.
Songbird 0.7: Big Improvements for the Little Music Player
Songbird, the desktop music player powered at its core by Mozilla technology, has recently released a new version: Songbird 0.7 (RC). This release offers several new features for the player, including Last.fm support and a refreshed UI. For music lovers, this new version is definitely worth a look.
eMusic Goes Web 2.0: Adds Content from Flickr, YouTube, and Wikipedia
Today, eMusic launched a major redesign of its site. The new design not only looks a lot fresher, but eMusic now also draws in information from Wikipedia, videos from YouTube, and photos from Flickr. EMusic is the second-largest online music retailer after iTunes, but it often doesn't quite get the coverage newer music sites like Pandora or Last.fm get.
Last.fm Starts Paying Royalties to Unsigned Bands
Online music service Last.fm today announced that it will start paying out royalties to unsigned and independent bands that upload their music to last.fm. Artists will earn royalties whenever their music is played on-demand, or on Last.fm's streaming radio service. Last.fm had first announced this in January, but it took until today for Last.fm to officially start up its Artist Royalty Program.
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