Category: TLW

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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 Fairtunes.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?

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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).

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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.

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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).