reworld.org

There’s an idea I’ve had kicking around for a year or two but which still hasn’t been implemented properly. So I’m going to post it for you to use! It lies somewhere between a neat trick and a business model for selling digital music without copyright enforcement or collective licensing.

Start by making two versions of each track you’re releasing. One is “tagged” with an intro or outro voiceover, directing the listener to the artist’s site. I heard a parodist named Johnny Crass doing this five years ago.

The voiceover could also suggest the availability of an untagged version from the artist’s website. When you go to the website, an untagged download could be available for $1. Or maybe for any non-zero cash payment — suggest a dollar for the average song but more or less if you like it more or you’re really poor.

Last year, Magnatune started doing something similar with some of the distribution channels for their music (although if you listen to the MP3 streams on their site, it’s only the ID3 tags that encourage you to purchase a copy of the track).

So the last twist to my proposal: the publisher/promoter should run a stack of nodes on various file sharing networks. When they publish a song, they should make lots of copies of the tagged version on these p2p networks, in various formats and at various bitrates. That way, the first users who go to download the song from p2p networks will get the tagged version. And, because most people won’t delete the tagged version once they’ve downloaded it, those will be the files that continue to dominate p2p search results.

And of course, one can ask paying downloaders — nicely — only to upload tagged versions of the track.

Hopefully Magnatune and their competitors will pick this up. Anyone who does: drop me a line, I’d love to hear about it.