Musicslu's "name your own price" music distribution system | Hacker News Reader

Musicslu's "name your own price" music distribution system

musicslu.com

3 pointsdimarco6 comments

The basics of Musicslu:

How does a community purchase work?

1. The artists of We Are Artists lists a total amount they would like to sell their release for, in this case $1,500.

2. You name your own price, using the "Make a pledge" button above, and offer the amount you would help purchase We Are Artists for.

3. If the total $1,500 is raised before Nov 27, 2009, the pledges are given to the musicians and the album is released under the Creative Commons license as a download for free sharing.

4. If the entire $1,500 is not reached, all pledges are discarded, and everyone walks away like nothing happened. The music is not released under Creative Commons and you pay nothing.

Musicslu is an attempt to address the problems with pirating music. If some music pirates could take a few steps out of their trenches, and some artists take a few steps out of theirs too, this could work.

"A cure for the disease of which the RIAA is a symptom."[http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html , listed at #1] If not the cure, at least a solid attempt.

I know I'm going to be slammed with downvotes, but I don't care, $1500 is a pathetic price for a CD. I think the concept has some cool potential, but an artist can't possibly survive on $1500 per album. And why the hell are there artists on here which are already on record labels that are clearly not going along with this and what the hell does "pending approval" mean. I'm sorry, but if you want this to work, it's going to have to be reasonable for artists, not deceive people into thinking music is there that isn't, and make a heck of a lot more sense.

It's not $1500 per album, it's however much the artist chooses. In this case, a bunch of artists from reddit.com got together and decided to make a mix tape and split the $1500. They are all relatively unknown artists who would like some exposure.

If another artist came and set the price at $10,000, then he'd receive 10k.

The albums on the front page pending approval are just that, artists that have been contacted. Without those placeholders, the site would be rather empty. It's no different than how reddit supposedly started as very few people with multiple accounts pretending to be very many people.

Placeholders are shit. I'd greatly prefer an empty and honest site. And it IS different from reddit if those accounts actually contributed something. One Republic? Are you serious? Do you think there's a snowball's chance in hell of getting One Republic on that site? It's a trick. These placeholder accounts are contributing absolutely nothing and never will.

On the issue of money, I see what you're saying, but the site seems to suggest that $1500 is a reasonable price one might see on here. $10k is barely reasonable when you consider that most artists make one CD every 2 years or so. Not that most artists GET $10k, but it's still pathetic. I'd like to see some consideration too for the fact that artists get a pathetic amount of money for their work. The notion of a starving artist is insane in a world that is so obsessed with entertainment.

I don't mean to sound angry. I'm just frustrated. I think there is a lot of potential here.

I'm sorry, I must be explaining this incredibly bad. It's not $1500 or $10,000, it's whatever the artist chooses. This isn't only for Jay Z or the Kings of Leon, there are thousands upon thousands of artists out there that don't have record deals or world-wide tours.

"I'd like to see some consideration too for the fact that artists get a pathetic amount of money for their work."

I couldn't agree more, this is why musicslu.com was created.

You're explaining it fine, but when I see prices that aren't even in the right order of magnitude, it makes me wonder. A reasonable price for a high-quality CD is over $100k. For a billboard-top-100-quality CD, over $500k. For a Jay Z CD, over $1m easy.

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