Fixing everything, really slowly

I’m pleased to see the online music is now largely DRM-free (and WMA seems dead too). Consumers can now buy music online and play it on any decent mp3 player.

In the past I thought mp3 downloads were a rip-off, now that this is changing I think there is a bigger problem.

Tunechecker (and no doubt countless others) allow you to shop around and find the best price for a given track or album (I’m far more interested in the latter BTW). It’s great the see the market finally squeezing the big record companies on price.

So things are looking better for the consumer but what worries me is the artists … especially the emerging artists. What percentage of the, now heavily competitive downloaded album price, are they getting? I bet it’s not much. I bet the situation is getting worse as the record companies try to squeeze more money out of their broken business models.

I would like to see a site where consumers can choose to buy music (and gig tickets, t-shirts and other merchandise) where the artists get the biggest share of the purchase price. I’d like artists (not their record labels) to be able to point their fans to the best retailer for a given track/album/ticket.

Failing that maybe it’s better to download illegally and “donate” money to your favourite bands? I wonder when we will start to see paypal “donate” buttons on myspace pages like we see on good free software pages today?

One of my favourite bands, Los Campesinos! has made the odd attempt to point fans to the cheapest ticket agency for upcoming gigs and reading between the lines of their excellent blog it’s clear they aren’t making much of a living from selling music and playing gigs despite being fairly successful. It should be easier for artists to get paid for what they do.

Meanwhile I think I’ll continue to do the following:

1. Listen to stuff before I buy using spotify, last.fm, myspace (and file2hd as necessary), download stuff illegally if it can’t be found legally.
2. Try to get money to the artists of the good stuff by buying stuff they make including CDs, DVDs, legal downloads, gig tickets, t-shirts and anything else they do (Björk makes cool books!).