Tunesquare – Download Music For Free and Pay the Artist?!

By: Rustycat | in: Music, Technology |

Here’s a pretty straight forward proposition for both music lovers like me and you and all the indie artists out there. As a music lover I can download free music as much as I want and support the artist financially in the process. How is this even possible, you ask?
Apparently it’s fairly simple. The guys at Tunesquare, a Swedish based stat up company, have created the business model everybody on the net is speaking about – ad supported downloads. I’ve seen many different models lately starting with the most successful Amie Street who offer artists a chance to monetize their music on a popularity basis and also Spiral Frog (launch already!), one of the most talked about websites on the net who are saying (it hasn’t opened worldwide yet) that you will need to watch ads as you download.
But Tunesquare differs in many ways. First and foremost there’s no talk of DRM and download tracking - free download means free download. Second, as I’ve heard, on Spiral Frog and the others you will need to revisit the website from time to time and see more ads to keep your music collection intact, whereas on Tunesquare they’ve taken the time to really consider user experience and the ads are fairly simple, it looks like you’re watching a YouTube video and then there’s a link to download the song or stream it directly – no registration needed and you don’t ever need to go back if you don’t want to.

Here’s how the download page looks:
Tunesquare download page

After all of us have listened to loads of music and downloaded more than we can store, they split ad revenue 50/50 with the artists. Sounds pretty fair from where I stand. Rather than selling your music on iTunes or any other store and making a few hundred dollars a year, now you can actually start monetizing your music much better and be able to promote and market it to your fans as free downloads. I think it’s great.
I also think this is just the beginning of change. You can start getting used to free legal music, because many of the artists and labels are shifting their business model in that direction rather than trying to fight it like the major companies have been in the past few years. The money making is going to become someone else’s problem soon, the deals will have to be licensing deals done behind the scenes. We want free music and we’re already getting it, if they want to make money, they should find a proper model to do so. I know of a few models that already work out there and Tunesquare is definitely one of them.

http://www.tunesquare.com/

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Posted on September 29, 2007

Comments

7 Responses to “Tunesquare – Download Music For Free and Pay the Artist?!”

Blog Feeds about Music » Archive » Tunesquare – Download Music For Free and Pay the Artist?! on September 29th, 2007 5:27 am

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Music » Tunesquare – Download Music For Free and Pay the Artist?! on September 29th, 2007 5:39 am

[...] Blog Feeds about Music Â» Archive Â» iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store Now Live wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptHere’sa pretty straight forward proposition for both music lovers like me and you and all the indie artists out there. As a music lover I can download free music as much as I want and support the artist financially in the process. … [...]

Violindip.Com » Tunesquare – Download Music For Free and Pay the Artist?! on September 29th, 2007 6:31 am

[...] unknown wrote an interesting post today on Tunesquare â�� Download Music For Free and Pay the Artist?!Here’s a quick excerpt [...]

TuneSquare Beta 1.1… descargate musica sin DRM de nuevos artistas : on September 30th, 2007 7:27 am

[...] TuneSquare Beta 1.1 es una web que “brinda” una oportunidad a los nuevos artistas y nos da la oportunidad de descargarnos sus canciones sin ningún tipo de DRM u otro tipo de restricción. [...]

Gerald on December 30th, 2007 11:48 am

Hi I found this thread and thought I would reply as I am an artist with music on Tunesquare and we are getting paid for giving away our music free.
It is really that simple there are no catches or even registration anyone who is into music should give it a try and dont think because its free that its rubbish and I am not saying that just because we are on there, I also know lots of other bands on there and their music is very good.
Best wishes
Gerald
CLING
http://www.clingmusic.co.uk

Kaen on March 3rd, 2008 2:16 am

This is a superb site for artists/bands we’ve got our music up and so have many of our artist friends and best of all we’re getting paid for our music downloads