Reply To: Does this creative commons, free distribution thing mean “Buy the box set and set up a torrent”
I could go on for pages about this, but for the sake of avoiding redundancy from stuff other people have said (what good is it if I talk but never listen?), I’ll attempt to contribute something new:
One way in which JoCo differs from many other artists who sell music via the internet — besides the innovative CC license — is that he includes the entire song in the preview. You can listen to it as much as you want; you just can’t keep it in your own separate file.
Sure, you can easily figure out the URLs to the actual MP3s. But the fact that JC doesn’t protect them is all part of the courtesy: it says, “hey, if you liked it, please throw me a buck or two, or ten, or whatever it was worth to you, okay?” It bears a very appropriate similarity to the “troubador” view of music: back in the “dark” ages before electronics, money was given out of appreciation, because there was a time when a song wasn’t a physically tangible, like a CD. You would give money so the music would continue, or to hear a specific favorite song more often. Troubadors didn’t make money by sitting around in silence until someone forked them a twenty, after all.
Recently, I had my CD collection stolen. After getting over the heartbreak (and downloading whatever replacements I could from Limewire), I bought my first new CD that I hadn’t owned before, and had a realization: album compilations are usually about 60% suckage. Even with my favorite artists, I often pass up all but the 4 or 5 best songs on the album.
Albums usually have crappy playlists, and you don’t KNOW that until you buy it because you can’t hear the album in its entirety until you do. It’s kinda like trading card games, where they trick you into buying 100s of crappy cards you don’t want in order to get to the good ones.
Instead of that, I would rather see more “troubadors” like Coulton, and also see them more prosperous than they are now.