Indie fairness

Posted on March 25, 2006 by Lessig

The band Beatnik Turtle has released an “Indie Band Survival Guide” (free, as in CC). They’ve also now practiced an important virtue. A fan complained that he had purchased BT music through the new Napster. But when he stopped paying, the music went away. BT has sent the fan a free album. A lesson taught well.

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2 Responses to Indie fairness

  1. Matt Arata says:
    March 27, 2006 at 7:24 am

    But that is the point of the new Napster. Nobody owns any music, you just pay a monthly fee to access their library. When you stop paying, you stop having access. Similar to a subscription based book library. The fan should not have complained.

  2. Randy from Beatnik Turtle says:
    March 27, 2006 at 8:58 am

    Napster has both kinds of models. Subscription and pay for song. Our fan had bought the music, but lost access to it when he lost the subscription. We know this because most subscription models reimburse us at about .01 or .02 a play. His were something like .65, which is a straight purchase.

    So this, again, is DRM stopping a person from doing what they wished with a legally purchased song. Now, the fan did agree to his agreement, and we could leave it at that. But we were already financially supported by him. (And, it stands to note that perhaps they’ve changed their model since then. Most of the reimbursements we’ve had from Napster since have been .02 per play, rather than a purchase.)

    From our point of view, after finding our band name mentioned in a blog post talking about DRM, we would rather send him the songs, which costs us nothing, and gives us a way to get in touch. Otherwise, his purchase is just a line item on a financial report from our distributor. As we mentioned in our blog, we don’t support DRM, so it was a simple decision.

    -Randy from Beatnik Turtle.

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