Bitcoin Forum

You'll be able to very soon, watch out for invitation codes to mpx.fm on the forums. At the moment I just need some unsigned bands to sign up and upload their music on www.mpx.fm, then we can start handing out invite codes. The site is in pilot mode and by invitation only at the moment.

How it works : if you have some music and you own the content and distribution rights (i.e. you're in the band or a solo artist, and you're not signed up to a record label), and you want to make money selling it on the internet, PM this user ('mpx') for an invitation code.

Use the code to create an account on www.mpx.fm and upload your music. You'll get some free invitation codes so you can invite users onto the site.

Then, quarterly the site pays you money according to how often your tracks are bought and sold.

The price of your tracks changes dynamically based on user demand.  Each time your track is exchanged between users, the site takes a cut, reinvests some in the site, and gives the rest back to to the band as a quarterly payout.

And the best bit ? We're fully bitcoin compliant - so users can buy music using bitcoins.

If I was going to buy music, I'd prefer to buy it with bitcoins but I wont buy music just because I can buy it with bitcoins.

What if it was cheaper than before ?

Nope. I don't waste my money on stuff I don't need and there's not that many things I want, certainly not some music I can get online for free or I rarely listen to at all. So I don't think I personally am your ideal customer. But you might find some who are.

You might wonder why I even bothered replying then, well, the reason is that sales pitches like yours "Look at me, you can spend your bitcoins with me!!" slightly irritate me. How about you focus on providing a great service that would appeal to me enough for me to be willing to part with some of my savings(what ever form that may be: fiat, pms, bitcoins) and then as a mere bonus offer to do so in bitcoins?

No problem Hazek, we look forward to having so much fantastic music at rock bottom prices that even you are tempted to buy a track - when we make it that far, it will be a bitcoin based success story for sure

Understood. That's the trade-off that digital music has to deal with these days.

On the plus side, the site is set up to be priced well under 79p/99c per track (and there are plenty out there who buy those...)

I think the future of music services is a platform that musicians can subscribe to that has only two functions: promote and advertise the musicians (including possible merchandising and concert planning), and being a platform where musicians can collect donations from fans and sell them their merchandise. The pay-per-track business is a quickly dying model.

Well, the whole mpx site is dynamically priced (users pay what they will and sell tracks at what they can), so one of the benefits is that you find out what music is really worth. Not every track is worth 79p to all users at all times ! We're connecting the bands straight to the users, which definitely cuts some middle men out of the loop.

Oh, sorry, forgot one more thing: providing users with the service or sorting, organizing, and storing their music for them, so they can always get easy access to their tracks without having to search through their hard drives, and you can suggest to them whatever other music they may like.

Good luck!

What percentage do artists get from their sales when they sell thru your site?

On the current artist terms

"The Service will pay you 70% of the income generated by the Content."

As a point of reference, that's rather better than the current music industry average given by this pie chart here

http://artandavarice.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/record-company.gif

70% from some unknown in a niche market?  Big players are beginning to offer much better percentages.  Try again.   ::)

Which ones ?

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/how-much-do-music-artists-earn-online/

I just bought this with btc:

http://seven7hwave.bandcamp.com/

I think the future will see a pay per PLAY model where the cost is fractional. Imagine if a musician was credited a fraction of a cent for every view of their music video on Youtube.  The world is going to cut out the middle man eventually, it will just take time because they are essentially the power structure.

If the service I'm being provided is just the privilege of playing a song, I will still bypass it and download it illegally, as will many others. I want something that will be worth MY time and money. A service that stores and organizes things, or makes it easy to donate to and support the artists I like with what I believe it's worth, I would pay for. Places that force me to pay just to listen to something I may end up not liking anyway? No thanks.
BTW, that's the main problem with paying for music. If I pay for an item at a store, and it's not what I thought, I can return it. If I pay for a song or a movie, and it sucks, I have already experienced it, so I can't return it. That's why I would rather pay for the experience AFTER getting a change to evaluate it instead of before.

I would support an artist but no, I would never pay per track.

I usually listen to ~30 semi-random track at a time and prefer not to care much who actually produced the tracks.

I'm all for giving a fair share to artists but the per track model is completely dead for people listening to music efficiently.

iTunes is paying close to 65% to artists and they are the #1 music distributor.  Dotcom's new service will claim to give artists 90%.  More and more artists are doing things from their own website and getting 100%.  I think you need to reevaluate your business model.

ok, thanks for advice. when the site is open you'll see there's a few other differences that hopefully provide added value for the band by increasing throughout (and therefore revenue) relative to other services. I hope you'll take a look once there are some tracks on there, will be interested to hear your views

I for one think that this is great idea and I hope that it will work out. I would buy music for reasonable price from my favorite bands to support them.

I have and I will buy music with Btc at coindl. But it must be cheap otherwise I will use Spotify instead.

No. I would prefer to download the music legally from for example Jamendo.com, ccmixter.org, listen to it, then I would like to donate BTC to support artists whose music I like.

I can't speak for the entire Bitcoin community here, but I would certainly buy music for BTC. I don't think pay-per-track is dead; so long as DRM is not involved I believe it to be an effective model. After all, just because you can shoplift from Wal-Mart doesn't mean you shouldn't purchase items from there.