BeatPick.com – Is there life after copyright?
Tapping into a growing concern that seeks to redress the balance between musicians, customers and record labels, BeatPick.com is a company that promotes a fairer way of doing business in the music industry. Working under the Creative Commons licensing system, the label splits the proceeds of each deal 50-50 with each selected musician and offers a combination of free full album streaming, low download prices, project collaborations and fast commercial music licensing.
Visitors are encouraged to listen to the complete album before they buy. They may then share purchased music with up to four friends using the free mp3 sender provided.
While the music industry struggles to develop elaborate systems to prevent file sharing and to protect copyright agreements, BeatPick releases are instead covered by a Creative Commons license. Musicians keep full ownership of their music and can terminate the contract at anytime. Customers are not treated as potential crooks and no DRM is applied, enabling the use of tracks for podcasts or samples. Furthermore, purchased music is compatible with any computer, ipod or mp3 player.
Filmmakers, Open Source developers, audiovisual artists, students and small charities have the opportunity to benefit greatly by using BeatPick’s music for free in their not-for-profit projects. All that we ask is that the artists get credit for their music.
Artists are encouraged to help each other developing new projects and release them under a Creative Commons license.
3 Responses to “BeatPick.com – Is there life after copyright?”
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One obvious question here is if BeatPick is a for profit, or non profit project. It seems Open in many regards, but how can it be sustained. What will sustain it?
Hi there, thanks for the question. We’re betting that on the one hand it is possible to grant people a certain degree of freedom in order to promote art, harness network externalities (word of mouth), give artists the possibility to collaborate with filmmakers on no-profit projects and all under the umbrella of the creative commons which protect some of their ownership rights but on the other hand to earn money with people that wish to enjoy a superior service and are willing to pay for it.
The idea is that there are many people that are happy with free streaming, with a free shared copy and with using our music for no-profit but there are also many other people who wish to get the WAV files for the music, who wish to get an original copy with artwork as well as to use the music for commercial projects and are willing to pay for this privilege. To some extent this is like offering a software for free and then selling the gold or platinum version. We guarantee a basic service for all people as we are interested in promoting art and getting our music out there but then we charge a fee for superior service.
I hope this gives a better idea regarding what we’re trying to do. Any other question are more then welcome.
David
One _really_ obvious question. In what way can this be said to be “open”?
You say you’re using the by-nc-sa license, but how do I “share-alike” when the only way of listening to the music is by streaming via a Flash player? I can’t make a local copy of it for myself, never mind sharing.
You say that non-commercial projects can re-use the music. How? By asking permission. The whole point of the Creative Commons project is to let people know what freedoms they have, so that they don’t have to ask permission.
As far as the practical freedoms granted to users is concerned, I see no difference between how this business operates and any other online music store. If you have no intention of putting your users in a position where they can exercise the freedoms granted by the CC by-nc-sa license, you shouldn’t be using it.
By slapping a Creative Commons logo on your site, you are being deliberately misleading, and distracting people from genuine free/open music services that they should be supporting, like Jamendo.
Matthew.