Magnatune is a "featured merchant" in the directory at the e-gold site.
Magnatune is known to readers of the Creative Commons blog and described in this Wikipedia article as a record label using the Creative Commons licenses. The founder also has a blog here.
Recently I started listening to some songs at the Magnatune website and bought my first album there, "Silver", by Beth Quist. It was nice to be able to pay with e-gold for this "Silver" album.
I like the business model and hope it is a great success for everyone involved.
On the other hand, I am not sure what exactly I am buying when I pay for an album as opposed to just listening for free over an Internet connection. The answer might be better quality of the files I can download. Then again, the quality of the Internet broadcast is already enough for me.
Therefore, for me the main advantage right now is that I can play the music without an Internet connection, which can break down sometimes and isn't available at all in other situations.
That advantage, however, might disintegrate in a couple of years. If fast and stable wireless Internet connections are available everywhere, there might be no need to download left at all.
Posted by Karl-Friedrich Lenz at June 15, 2004 11:49 AM | TrackBack