Starting with this, riffing on this, and this, and the idea of serialized novels back in the old days, what do you think of offering either password protected access to a page or just a page whose address is provided--in trust I guess--to those who subscribe in advance? Say for a six dollar subscription, you get six tunes, one per month.

I'm sure someone somewhere's done it already or thought of it. Did it work? Did it suck? Am I still crazy for even bothering to think about this?

I think that's a good idea, because it eliminates the whole thing of paying for tunes on a per-transfer basis, which I think is part of what makes the online music idea seem so fishy to some people. I've actually been meaning to mention this sort of thing to EHL for some time now. I definately think access should be cumilative and unlimited, so that during the six-month period you'd have access to everything that went into that directory, and I think it would be best if there were multiple file-formats and bitrates available, along with human- and lawyer-readable copies of your license agreement, and whatever other kind of material you could think of to stick in there during the six-month period. You could then just lock the user account at the end of the subscription. One issue would be deciding how to manage old material. Would you delete a tune a month, so that at any one time there was only six months' worth of stuff in the directory? Archive it every month, and give lifetime access to the archives you payed the subscription-price for? What if I join the day before you decide to delete/hide some old release I wanted access to? There's more implementation issues to bang out than there would be if people were paying on a per-transfer basis, but I definately think it lowers Shirky's "mental transaction costs" to an absolute minimum, which is a good thing.

Never seen this approach tried before, unless you count e-music's unlimited monthly access deal, which got the axe. But that's different anyhow because you were getting unlimited access to however-many thousand tunes that way. Also, I wonder if there's an effective way to regulate where the tunes were being downloaded from, and whether such regulation would be desireable? You couldn't do it on an ip-basis, what with dhcp and all, and cookies are not the most robust of things either ...

I like the idea, looking into online distribution at the moment as well.

I think that you could very well implement such a thing 'on the go' and 'go as we learn' basis, just let said user A paypal you that amount or bitpass or whatever means of transaction and set him up (either manually or automated) with a user/password combination for a login protected page?

you log all downloads per user, there is something you would have to look in to imho, cos how do you regulate as Analytic pointed out as well, if that ip really is the users own...

hmm, wonder what this discussion will lead to.

ps: Pieter, nice i found this site..really cool reading material! thanks

Goodness...I hit some kind of a wall late yesterday evening: suddenly all this brainstorming about downloading music stopped being a storm and just made my brain hurt.

I think the subscription idea isn't really appropriate for me myself and my own tunes. Under the umbrella of a label, I think it's right. So, as for this test, I'm not doing the subscription I don't think.

But, I did do a little work on implementing the idea last night, and it's not as hard as I'd thought.

I have a script which manages password protected subscriptions. I can change the time-frame to anything I like. So, subscribers would always get six months from the date of their subscription. It's automatic and they can auto-renew. It even does fancy stuff like auto-forgotten-password retrieval, and sends out very official sounding emails automatically. It would be name/username/password dependent, not IP dependent. I can manage it all with a simple control panel.

I could integrate that with say Paypal so that a transaction number is all that's required to authorize the subscription, sort of like how Movable Type do it.. Too, the user wouldn't even have to send me an email and wait for approval.

I think that's how it would work...as far as the subscription model goes. I'd keep the tunes up indefinitely I think. There are other issues to tackle of course, but once I did some experiments last night, I realized it's not as tricky as I thought.

I think the per-transfer idea is indeed a bit clumsy. There would also have to be some kind of preview function.

Anyway, for now, for my own stuff--not a/the label--I think I'm sticking to the original idea: free music, donate if you want. I'd rather the stuff I'm sitting on get out than just disappear into a black hole. If it makes people happy, cool. That was the original idea...to make money on it wasn't. But if it promotes me or my stuff elsewhere, then that's great.

Welcome John! Nice seeing you in here.

CD went out today! (hooray for timeliness!)

good stuff Pieter.

really looking forward then to a workout of those ideas. and to the cd ofcourse :)

hello all :wave:

yes, very interesting stuff here pieter - I've been reading and posting here for several hours now. But will you actually notice any comments to these old posts I wonder? Maybe you get an automatic prompt saying someone has commented. If so, you're going to be getting quite a few :)

nice site!