I hope this is the right subforum, and forgive me if it's not.
I was just going through my computer, cleaning up old files, and I happened to stumble upon an idea that I wrote a while back, which I never acted upon, and never will do, but perhaps the idea will be of use for somebody else. Since I'm not going to act on this idea, it's unlikely that I will chime on in discussion regarding this idea. But who knows, perhaps someone finds value in this idea, and makes it a successful service?
Forgive me if this has been discussed before and if this is not the right forum to post in regarding this issue.
I've been mining a little with my GPU, and generally following the development of bitcoin. I just got a great idea (which others probably already tought of), what if artists started to take payment in the form of bitcoins? Then there would be a possibility that fans could donate money to artists they like or that fans could pay with bitcoins to recieve high quality sound tracks made by their artist/band. For many musicians, it is too difficult to get a major record label to release and market their music. However there is a lot of music that is not well known, but still is good.
There are many ways this could be done, but one idea would be to make a site where you pay a fixed rate every month and have unlimited downloads of tracks. Then your membership fee is distributed among the artists who owns the songs that you download.
With a very low monthly fee, this could be huge. All the details I haven't tought of, but this way even the ones making technoremixes in their spare time could make some money from it. Even if a song was priced at 0.02bitcoins, if 3000 people downloaded it in a month, it would total 60 bitcoins, approximately 48 dollars (at the time when this idea was written). This is not too much, but I still think a lot of unknown songwriters and performers would be happy to recieve amounts like that. Seeing that 7000 people downloaded your song for free is nice, but you did not make anything from it, and you still need to pay your daily costs. Only 0.01 bitcoin from each of those would have given you 70 bitcoins. As you see, it adds up quite substantionally.
If this was successful, I guess that we would see services offering software and equpiment to those musicians where the services charge in bitcoins.
For such a music site a few things would be important:
* Liquidity, getting enough artists to join in that it would be interesting for members to buy music
* Getting enough members so that it would be interesting for musicians to join.
The benefit for everybody would be:
* Free signup for artists and members.
* Monthly membership fee and unlimited downloads.
* Direct bitcoin payment for artists once a week or once a month, where we have a model of distributing the income among the musicians based on their share of downloaded tracks among members.
* No transaction fees as long as payments are made with bitcoins.
So say user Joe joins the site and pays 5 bitcoins for his monthly membership fee (that's 0,16 bitcoins a day). He downloads 300 songs over one month. 5 of these where made by artist RockGerald. RockGerald then recieves (5/300)*5 = 0,083 bitcoins from that particular user. Fast forward a couple of years with a memberbase of millions and integration with all the larger social networks, the revenue stream for good artists could potentially be of such a standard that a living could be made. I guess nobody would become multimillionaires, but some artists would be able to make good money.
And for the users, this would be great, as they could buy a lot of music without the money getting into the pockets of record labels.
The site would make money through charging a fee from the bitcoin stream that goes through the system. I haven't tought of details regarding that yet.
