Back in the 90’s I was downloading (painfully slowly) electronic music from Kosmic Music Foundation, a group of artists who offered up their music for free download. This was a little before sites like MP3.com came along. If you were into electronica, this was the site. They have an archive up, although there hasn’t been any new music in a few years.

http://www.kosmic.org/

“What do you think about OiNK being shut down?
Trent: I’ll admit I had an account there and frequented it quite often. At the end of the day, what made OiNK a great place was that it was like the world’s greatest record store. Pretty much anything you could ever imagine, it was there, and it was there in the format you wanted. If OiNK cost anything, I would certainly have paid, but there isn’t the equivalent of that in the retail space right now. iTunes kind of feels like Sam Goody to me. I don’t feel cool when I go there. I’m tired of seeing John Mayer’s face pop up. I feel like I’m being hustled when I visit there, and I don’t think their product is that great. DRM, low bit rate, etc. Amazon has potential, but none of them get around the issue of pre-release leaks. And that’s what’s such a difficult puzzle at the moment. If your favorite band in the world has a leaked record out, do you listen to it or do you not listen to it? People on those boards, they’re grateful for the person that uploaded it — they’re the hero. They’re not stealing it because they’re going to make money off of it; they’re stealing it because they love the band. I’m not saying that I think OiNK is morally correct, but I do know that it existed because it filled a void of what people want.”

Also, the rest of it is quite the interesting read.

http://www.sheeba.ca/store/letterSDP.php

She’s had the pay-what-feels-good-to-you model in place for a while now (couple of years?).

No disrespect to Radiohead (i doubt they see what they’re doing as iconoclastic) but they’re certainly not the first major label act to go this route.

.g

I guess traditionally most of the groups released all sorts of stuff from demos and intros to music and computer gfx, but at some point music only groups like Mono (nowadays Mono211 / Monotonik the net label), KFMF, Phase Distortion, Radical Rhytms, Tokyo Dawn Records (still active as a net label), etc. started emerging. The modules circulated first by dialup BBS systems, mail swapping and whatnot, and moved to net.

Having been somewhat active on the scene, releasing on a few music groups and net labels, running one at some point and doing websites for a few more, I’d wager that those scene music groups were actually where the whole net label thing started.

The whole netlabels thing has been going on for more than “a little while”.. I was listening to netlabels in 1998.. they were probably invented about 20 seconds after the invention of the mp3 in 1994 or whatever it was.

In a way, attention spans are like real estate now. But I’m shooting for finding an audience that has one, because a more fickle crowd wouldn’t do me any good in the long run.

People have been talking and talking about this shit for years and now it is finally happening. Given that my favorite artist is the producer on this album, I jumped at the chance to support this.

I’d like to find out exactly how much Radiohead get per retail CD, and give them 50p above that.

What do you mean? It’s worth the same as our Canadian dollar, you think those are worthless!?!? ;)