I opened Transmission last night before I went to bed, downloading a torrent of free music. And I didn’t for one second feel guilty, because it was Nine Inch Nails’ new CC-licensed album. I was thrilled because instrumental stuff has become my MO for background noise while I work.
This morning, it took me about 20 minutes to order the FLAC download due to site overloading. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to resume the supposedly one-time download thus far, without success. (I’ll probably be able to find it via BT or a more successful friend later on.) Lesson to musicians going their own way: You can’t make money if your site doesn’t work under real-life load. I hope that in the same spirit in which he disclosed the economic fallout from his last Internet distribution experiment, Trent Reznor will disclose the problems he had with the store, and then use this to help educate other independent musicians about how to effectively harness technology for their own Internet sales. On the other hand, not every indie is as popular as NIN.
I’ve long thought that a useful Fedora or CentOS spin would be a simple turnkey music and art storefront using all FOSS technology. Grab yourself some Amazon EC2/S3 space, install “Fedora Artist Store,” fill out a web-based form to set prices and upload your work, and watch the money roll in.
In any case, to do my part to support the model:
Just met you 2 hours ago in Exposol. Thanks for the chat and the conference as well… and I can see now you have a good taste when it comes to music.