“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:

• TIME – Deal­ing with down­load guilt
• BizRe­port – Exclu­sive inter­view with Matt Goyer
• ZDNet – Guilty over Nap­ster swaps?
• USATo­day – Ain’t too proud to beg on the net
• Wired – Why U2′s Bono Gets an $80 tip

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?