Category: Play!

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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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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).

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Before I started working in an office, I exercised martial arts three times a week. But then, after I started my new job at the office, I lacked the motivation and the time.

About four weeks ago, I started exercising 15 – 20 min morning before having breakfast.
Usually I wake up at 06:15, then I cuddle a bit with Sanna, gets dressed, drinks a moutful of water and then gets outside for a 3-min jog to get the morning newspapers.
After that I start exercising, by using my own body weight as resistance.
Push-ups, sit-ups, dips, squats, back lifts and other well known exercises.

It’s totally worth it! Instead of feeling drowsy and weak, I feel energized and alert.
Exercising is proved to have a very positive effect on your life and overall well-being.

It’s not for nothing that HealthyOntario.com states:

”Physical activity is a key factor in the health and quality of life for Canadians of all ages. It is essential for healthy growth and development in childhood: it develops a strong, healthy heart; muscular strength and flexibility, and bone density. It also contributes to maintaining healthy weight, building positive self-esteem, and setting healthy habits for life.
In adults, regular physical activity provides almost limitless benefits, including:

  • maintenance of healthy weight
  • reduced stress levels
  • relieved symptoms of depression and anxiety
  • increased energy
  • improved sleep and digestion
  • improved posture and balance
  • stronger muscles and bones
  • more confidence and a more positive outlook on life
  • ability to perform daily tasks with more ease and less fatigue
  • increased bone density
  • better circulation
  • strengthened heart and lungs
  • improved mood
  • strengthened immune system
  • prolonged good health and independence in seniors
  • better quality of life.

Regular physical activity also reduces the risk of premature death from heart disease, stroke and certain types of cancer; reduces the risk of developing high blood pressure; and lowers total blood cholesterol and triglycerides and increases high density lipoproteins (HDL or the “good” cholesterol).”

Every little step counts, each minute is an investment. Place it wisely, and have fun while doing it.
Also, if you exercise regularly you’ll find it much easier to keep your eating habits healthy. It’s just like when you were a kid and you’d just built your first sand castle.
The coolest part about exercising early is that you then have the hardest part of the day behind you. If you organize the rest of your day in a similar fashion, it is quite easy to keep yourself motivated and disciplined. That’s the way I like it, what works for you?

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During this summer I’ve:

  • Participated in a LARP, Ingenmansland. This was quite an experience. Awesomeness!
  • Traveled to Narvik and Bodö. Met up with Oskar and had a great time camping with Sanna.
  • Finished reading ‘Harry Potter’ – series. I will certainly miss them.
  • Finished viewing ‘Lost’ and started viewing ‘Heroes’. I like the thing that both got their own ARG’s.
  • Went swimming in Hagaparken several times.

    • Over and all, I had a very good summer, filled with joy and curious adventures in reality.