Magnatune: Modelo ideal para sellos discográficos del futuro

Magnatune es un buen ejemplo de que el mundo de los sellos discográficos y la venta de música está cambiando drásticamente:

Magnatune es un sello discográfico estadounidense que distribuye música libre por internet. Utiliza licencias de tipo Creative Commons, de forma que es gratuito licenciar su música para fines no comerciales, y tienen distintos precios para los distintos usos comerciales. Su lema es "We are a record label. But we are not evil.". (Somos un sello discográfico. Pero no somos malvados).

Uno se sorprende al examinar las características de este sello discográfico:

• Perfect audio quality: you get CD quality audio WAV files, as well as super-high quality VBR MP3s, AAC, and open source friendly FLAC and OGG formats (sample download page)
• No DRM: No copy protection (DRM), you can do what you like with your music
• Listen to everything: all our albums can be listened to in their entirety before you buy
• Good music: we work with artists directly, not with record labels, and all our music is hand-picked. On average, we accept 3 out of every 100 submissions
• MP3s everywhere: Our MP3s play everywhere: iPods, Creative, SanDisk, iRiver and every portable device that supports MP3s
• Musicians get paid: 50% of your purchase price goes directly to the musician, not to labels and their lawyers
• Album art: every album includes high quality album art (in both Adobe Acrobat and 300DPI JPG formats)
• Give to your friends: We encourage you to give 3 copies of any music you buy to your friends
• Name your price: you choose how much you want to pay for the music, and 50% of your choice goes to the artist
• Downloads and CDs: all our music can be bought as a download or a delivered-by-postal-mail CD
• Creative Commons: All our 128k MP3s are some-rights-reserved Creative Commons licensed
• Remix friendly: Tons of our music, acapellas and samples are available for Remixing at CC Mixter
• 100% legal: you’re not breaking any laws, Magnatune is completely legal all over the world
• Artists direct: we sign contracts directly with musicians, so you can rest assured that we can legally license music to you, and no middlemen get in the way of the artist’s royalties
• Podcast-legal: non-commercial podcasters can use our music for free
• Free review copies: music reviewers (web, print and radio) can get free copies of all our music
• No major labels: we have absolutely nothing to do with major labels or the RIAA
• Financially support Open Source: we financially support several open source projects such as Amarok and Rhythmbox
• APIs for programmers: our APIs and data feeds are available to academics (who write many papers about us) and open source programmers (see for example, the Slim player plugin).
• Licensing: all our music can be licensed for commercial use instantly and online and without additional permissions or any other form of censorship. We license more music online than anyone else in the world (over 2000 licenses in our 5 years of business).

Como si esto fuera poco, existe un plugin que permite que puedas escuchar las casi 8,000 canciones en SongBird. Además, puedes insertar discos completos en páginas y blogs. Mientras escribo esta entrada escucho  Curandero, un grupo que combina el flamenco con la música de la India. ¡Fascinante!

Curandero by Curandero