Cool ideas

Automatic Artist Reward System

Todays system of rewarding artists is severely flawed. Not only do the artists get fleeced by the record companies, but
millons of file traders are not making any effort to reward the artists. What motivation does an artist have for making music?

Online music sites like pressplay, musicnet and rhapshody don't cut it; they are overpriced, underfeatured and the restricted user experience keeps the file trading networks hopping. Short of EMusic.com, most of the online sites fleece the artist even worse than the online systems.

Furthermore, retail stores suck for discovering new music, so its not surprising that people keep flocking to the file trading networks where they can discover music from their peers and not some marketing program focused on bringing in bucks.

In an ideal world I would like to task my audio player to keep track of what music I listen to, and then at periodic intervals I want it to remind me to contribute some bucks to the artists. I'd like to tell my player to take $10 from my PayPal account and divvy it up among the artists of my music collection based on what and how often music was played. The player could allow me to tweak how I wanted to rewards artists -- adjust some sliders that control how much you donate for playing a track, how much for downloading a new track. Perhaps it could also pay a little extra to the artists I listen to the most.

Of course we would need to have a third party like Musiclink collect the > $1 donations and then divide them up according to the donors instructions and collect the money for the artist. Once the money pools to more than $1, the artists can pick up their money. This system avoids the drawbacks of micropayments, since the only money transactions are greater than $1, and people don't need to deal with fidgety dollar fractions.

But alas, we do not live in an ideal world. Maybe someday.

Posted by Mayhem at September 10, 2002 11:42 AM