Magnatune is a record label with an entirely new and clued-in business model.

They really seem to ‘get’ it: they publish their music in a variety of formats from which you can choose, CD-Quality WAV files to MP3s; they use a shareware model which lets you listen to entire albums before you buy; they use a sliding scale for home purchases ($5-$18 I can’t imagine why one would pay more than the min); the artists get 50% of sales; and they have a unique automatic licensing system for folks who need to license music for commercial use (you can even get the tunes for free for non-commercial uses).

So what’s the downside? They don’t publish any artists you’ve ever heard of.

I’ve been browsing their catalog for the past couple of days and haven’t heard anything I consider buying. Which is unfortunate as I would really like to support them. There is plenty of stuff I would consider licensing for commercial projects (because it’s cheap), but most of it seems to be B or C grade material. permanent link to this post