While looking for a standard way to incorporate Creative Commons metadata to BitTorrent torrents I found some interesting applications of both technologies to the music industry:
- Jamendo-a repository of non-mainstream music albums as the one that you can see in the picture. Most music on the site is licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licence, thus the use and distribution of music is free in most common occasions. In order to save bandwidth Jamendo uses Peer-to-Peer technology (and yes, it is legal; the legality of a technology doesn’t depend of its misuses).
- Magnatune-is a little recording company whose motto is “We are not evil”. Indeed its business model is quite intriguing: all recordings are free to download, half of their income goes to the artists and you can choose the price of the albums you decide to buy. I really appreciate their refusal of the DRM techniques: these techniques are quite useless, since they bother legitimate users and are usually ineffective against illegitimate users. Magnatune has also a very easy way to licence music for commercial purposes.
- Prodigem-a hosting company that simplifies the use of torrents: in just a few clicks you can upload your files to their servers, choose the licence to use (all CC licences are there and some commercial licences too), create a torrent and even charge a fee for every download. The torrents are feeded by Prodigem servers until there are 3 other seeds on the Internet and after that you don’t pay Prodigem for the bandwith.
Update: Prodigem was acquired by MoveDigital and is a of July 18th 2006 a part of its services. See the announcement on their blog.