A new way to sell music.

Everybody knows that the sale of music has changed dramatically and is continuing to change.

The old model of music sales went something like this: A musician is discovered by a record label. The musician is recorded in a studio, physical copies are made, and distributed to brick-and-mortar stores. The label is an important part in this system because recording equipment is expensive, physical copies are difficult and expensive to make, and the label's ongoing relationship with stores is required to get the record physically in the door.

In this modern world the record label is completely obsolete. It is relatively inexpensive and easy to record professional quality digital recordings. The iPod has made physical copies unneeded or even undesirable. Download services cut brick-and-mortar music stores out of the equation completely.

You must still make the connection between the artist and their consumers, but this connection can be made directly via Internet. Many Internet fads have spread like wildfire without a single ad dollar being spent. Everyone I know listens to, and in many cases owns, music by Jonathan Coulton but I have never once seen any sort of advertisement for him whatsoever. An artist can become famous purely by word of mouth.

Even a centralized location to purchase mp3s from is entirely optional. Mp3 stores such as iTunes and Amazon are convenient, but an online store can be stapled on to basically any website ever. Coulton and others have mp3 stores attached to their personal website. I have bought all 4 "thing-a-week" ablums directly from Coulton's website.

So... I've ranted about the state of things enough. Here's my idea:

You can't sell music. Not really. No digital copy can ever be "copy-protected". If you are capable of consuming it through the senses it can always be copied. Even if they somehow get copy-protection to the point that the files can't be copied and the wires can't be split and rerouted we can still put a microphone up to a speaker and STEAL music.

You can't sell music in any reliable way. Which means people only pay for music for one of three reasons. 1) They are "Lawful" aligned and don't want to break the law. Or they fear the potential consequences of doing so. 2) The desire to pay the musician for their work. 3) It is more convenient to buy it legitimately than to steal it.

Motivations 1 and 2 are both completely outside the control of the distributor. You can't force people to buy music out of respect for the law. The RIAA's recent strategy has been to leverage lawsuits and advertising to attempt to do just that, but with seemingly little success. And you cannot force people to be charitable, for obvious reasons.

The only good way to distribute music is to offer an absolutely convenient distribution service. Amazon, iTunes, and other music services have gotten a lot right. Music is easily searchable, easy to download, etc. But iTunes gives you a "five computers" DRM-locked download limitation and Amazon Mp3 has a one download per purchase policy that doesn't allow any re-downloading. Compare this to Valve's Steam service for video game distribution: If I purchase a game on Steam I can download it fast, play it, use the built-in functionality to back it up to disc, re-download it and re-install it as often as I like. If I drop my $20 on a game I get fast, reliable access to my game that persists beyond the sales transaction.

Music should absolutely be available this way. If I purchase a song it should always be available for me to download to any device, in any quality or format I want. Maybe I download a low-quality mp3 of a Christmas song while visiting family for the holidays but when I get home to my own computer I want a loss-less-quality copy of that song for mixing with a photo collage of Christmas morning. I gave my $1, I deserve that song in whatever format I want. Furthermore, the reasonable price for music is $1/song, $7-10 per average album.

Even offering an absolutely convenient mp3 distribution, anyone with any degree of technical expertise could still pirate it quite easily. Here's where my big idea comes in. Money spent on MP3s earns you credit to buy physical stuff. T-shirts, a copy of the album you just bought, mouse pads, whatever other physical schwag a fan might want to hoard. Furthermore, if you spend money (but not credit) on schwag you earn credit in the MP3 store. With a major distributor like iTunes or Amazon you could buy a Beatles album as MP3 and use your earned credit to buy a Metallica t-shirt. Each sale encourages more purchasing, and all sales encourage the consumer to become a fan and go to a concert, which is where the artist really makes their money, anyway.

Furthermore, an artist could sell a CD at their concert and give out coupon-codes for buying MP3s at their online store, to buy a digital copy of the same album (for the tech illiterate) or another album, an copy for a friend, etc. Most of the value in this type of store lies in the free advertising, but I think there is still a heap of money to be made this way. I am fairly confident that the digital side of the business can be operated inexpensively, even with loss-less quality multiple-download users bogging up the net. Certainly even a 10MB download of a song costs considerably less than $1 in hosting and bandwidth, for any reasonable level of popularity for the service. If this is not the case, perhaps files can be purchased at $1 per song for reasonable mp3 quality, and loss-less copies cost $1 more to own.

The bulk of the expenses related to a purchase will be the cost of producing the physical schwag. MP3 downloaders will be viewing these items as free, and people there for the schwag are used to paying $20 for a t-shirt. shirt.woot has proven that high-quality t-shirts can be printed and shipped for $10-15, so there should still be considerable profit on that side of the business as well.

The artists will make as much as they are used to making on music and schwag sales, or possibly way more. Fans would be deliriously happy to be getting so much "free" stuff. The absolute convenience received from the MP3 store should help to reduce piracy. Is it really worth saving $10 to hunt down a torrent of an album, when spending that $10 will also land you a sweet t-shirt?

The start of my Idea Blog

I am starting this blog because I keep having ideas. A lot of them are stupid, but I'm confident that some percentage of them are actually quite genius. The blog is my friend Shad Tischer's idea. I think he suggested this blog as a means of self-preservation. In the past my ideas would just rattle around in my head. When I came up with an idea that grasped my imagination particularly violently I would corner one of my friends and rant at them, and politeness would force them to listen to me for hours at a time.

My ideas are usually centered around technology. Topics are likely to include video games, movies, music, the internet, etc. Some of my posts may not be specific ideas, but may just be my analysis of the current state of something broken. In the case of one of these rants I would like to make it clear that I am not a specialist in anything whatsoever.

This is not a personal blog; I have no intention of writing anything about myself or my life. For this first post, however, I will introduce myself. My name is Branden odd Conley. I have been happily married to Elly Sheehan Lyman Conley since May of 2007. I live in Colorado. I have two cats. I work for a company that is on the bleeding edge of work-flow management and virtualization, specifically in the area of health care. I have a fanatical obsession with video games, movies, horror in any form, and the color blue. I play pen-and-paper RPGs such as Dungeons and Dragons two to three nights a week. My wife Elly has Multiple Sclerosis. I am still friends with most of the people I was friends with in high school. I am a huge supporter of art and creativity in any form; almost all of friends are artists, musicians, writers, or designers.

I do not expect this blog to update very often, as I am quite busy. I'm going to make a best-effort attempt to have correct spelling and grammer, but I am notoriously bad in that area. My ideas are being publicly displayed here, but I still retain whatever intellectual property I have for all ideas in this blog. If anyone reads my blog and finds something that also inspires them I would be happy to work with anyone to get any of these ideas into some useful form. I am also an avid fan of open-source idealogy, and would also be willing to work toward a free-use implementation of an idea.