Category Archives: TLW

Fairtunes

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“Fair­tunes is a free, vol­un­tary, dig­i­tal music pay­ment system that allows music fans to vol­un­tar­ily send money to, com­pen­sate or tip, any artist for their work. Fair­tunes empow­ers any artist to receive money online in the form of a vol­un­tary pay­ment. “

Fair­tunes was a com­pany formed in the year 2000 that then got bought up and renamed to Musi­clink in 2002. In the Musi­clink ver­sion, the “sending-money-to-music-creator”-feature was dis­abled. The founders got weblogs where you can find related infor­ma­tion: Matt Goyer and John Cormie.

The idea, was to enable users to send money to music creators.

It soon got quite exten­sive press coverage:

Remem­ber, this was back in 2000/2001.

Matt Rigaux com­mented on the arti­cle Moving the goal recently this year (2008):

“During the first bubble, a friend of mine had a site in 2000 called Fair​tunes.com, which was a “tipping service”. If you wanted the labels out of the way in order to pay the artist directly for their work, you could send money to Fair­tunes and they would remit cheques to the man­agers of what­ever artist you chose. In the begin­ning they were send­ing $2.00 cheques to people like David Bowie, but it was early, and it was more of a signal of what was pos­si­ble than any­thing else.

Their model relied on the honor system, in that of course not every­one was going to vol­un­tar­ily pay artists for songs they down­load for free, but some would, and the theory was that this would approx­i­mately equal what the artist would get from higher volume sales – LESS the labels’ cut. Great idea, and they got national atten­tion due to the Nap­ster craze, but to Fred’s point, there was too much fric­tion in the process of get­ting money to them that most didn’t adopt it and it fiz­zled out.

For me per­son­ally, the most fric­tion­less way to get this done would be if a ser­vice pen­nies just got added to my monthly inter­net or cell phone bill, and I got to make one pay­ment a month for all my music. My part of the process would be com­plete and it would be out of my hands, and the ser­vice would just remit trans­ac­tion fees back to the car­ri­ers, artists, man­agers, labels, etc.

Would love to see a Fair­tunes model re-​emerge, but to make it fric­tion­less, the pay­ments have to be dig­i­tal, added on to exist­ing things I’m locked into paying for reg­u­larly, and divis­i­ble fairly amongst the stake­hold­ers that cre­ated the con­tent and enabled that fric­tion­less payment.”

I second that. That is an excit­ing solu­tion to a unprac­ti­cal problem.

Why havn’t anyone tried since then?

An album for 4$

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“Because the eco­nom­ics of the music busi­ness is so bad for musi­cians, you don’t have to send more than a dollar before you have com­pen­sated them fairly for down­load­ing an entire album.” – TIMES

What they seem to forget is the writ­ers, pro­duc­ers and other essen­tials who don’t get com­pen­sated. But the thought of fair com­pen­sa­tion with­out record com­pa­nies, pub­lish­ers and retail­ers are with­out any doubt interesting.

The dis­tri­b­u­tion is there: MySpace, Last.fm, The Pirate Bay and Spo­tify (and others).

Jazzy wedge

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Morning
During my morn­ing, I got hooked by this air­plane painted cross on an oth­er­wise clear sky.

Today I’ve been going through Django’s tuto­ri­als, and I’ve set up my local envi­ron­ment.
To me, it is a pretty steep learn­ing curve just to fully under­stand all of the stuff that I’m learn­ing through the tutorials.

After the tuto­ri­als I installed sup­port for OpenID, using django_​openidconsumer. Prob­lem was, that it didn’t work as expected. After I searched a while, I rec­og­nized that it used maxlength instead of max_​lenght. Then I read the dis­cus­sions on django_​openidconsumer, and of course, some­one had already posted a patch to fix it. Sweet :)

Tomor­row I’m head­ing towards Got­land together with Sanna. I’m look­ing for­ward to it, but I prob­a­bly won’t be able to work upon TLW until next Wednesday.

Fireworks, bonfires, and true lagom solutions

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Today is the day I started devel­op­ing what right now is called TLW, which stands for the Lagom model.

Loosely based upon the Swedish model, and “Lagom”, which means “Enough is as good as a feast”, this is an attempt to make it easier to show your grat­i­tude towards the musi­cians (and later movie makers and game cre­ators) who we all love. It’s all about con­tribut­ing in order to sup­port fur­ther creations.

Today means that I will work from home every Wednes­day, Thurs­day and Friday during a lim­ited time.
Tech­ni­cally speak­ing, I will build TLW using the Django frame­work (for order), together with a sprin­kle of jQuery (for magic mat­ters, that is). As my web hosts, I’ve chosen to work with Web­fac­tion which offer good and reli­able sup­port for Django.

In order to setup a tem­po­rary office, I’ve bought a key­board and a mouse.
This is how it looked yesterday:

Before

And this is how it looks today:

After 2

After

Todays work­load con­sisted mostly of set­ting up a proper devel­op­ment envi­ron­ment, such as installing django, post­gresql and django_​openidconsumer and writ­ing a proper busi­ness plan. Tomor­row I will focus more on pure development.

And for all of you who cares: as my OS I use Ubuntu 8.10, Geany as my editor and I run Ubuntu with compiz on normal, just to make up for my now, slow machine (1st gen Dell XPS M1330).