paying artists (was: Re: Freedom or Copyright? - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation) (FSF)

[simo]

On Thu, 2008-02-14 at 18:10 +0100, list at akfoerster.de wrote:
> Am Thursday, dem 14. Feb 2008 schrieb Alex Hudson:
> 
> > It still comes back to the basic issue with earning a living from this
> > kind of art.
> 
> Most artists cannot make a living from their record cotract alone at all.
> 
> > There are plenty of people willing to pay money for it, but
> > there are up-front costs which need to be covered, thus you need
> > investment. If self-publishing and gathering income that way were so
> > easy, bands would be doing that instead of getting record contracts (and
> > a good proportion of them actually do; not many make a living from it
> > though).
> 
> Are you trying to tell us, that nobody would make music, because the costs
> are too high??? I beg to differ!
> 
> > I haven't seen [m]any examples of where that was done before
> > the artist was sufficiently well-known to be able to do it.
> 
> Have a look at Jamendo: http://www.jamendo.com/
> Most artists there don't have a record contract.
> Because only few independent labels allow publishing with Creative Commons.
> 
> Paying through Jamendo is possible, 
> but that's not as easy as it should be (Paypal).

www.magnatune.com is another site that does something similar, although
they select their artists (and thus on average quality is much higher).
There you can pay with a credit card and you can decide if you want a CD
burned and shipped to you, or just download the bits (you get to choose
how much to pay and 50% goes to the artist, which compared to 2-7% from
record labels is a big difference).
Music is not released under CC, licenses (IIRC) but I've found their
licensing terms to be quite reasonable.

Simo.