Now With 99.3% Less Evil!

One of the other notable online distributors, Magnatune, has the credo: "We are not evil." Here at BitWorks we have improved on this concept. 99.3% less evil! Less evil than what? I'm sorry, I am not at liberty to disclose the evil benchmarks we have devised in our evil BitWorks laboratory. Why 0.7% evil? I keep that evil card in my back pocket, because friends, as you know, you can't have rock and roll without evil.

John Buckman has done some great things at Magnatune. I find his "choose what you want to pay" idea fascinating, and horrifying from an accounting point of view. I can't begin to imagine that nightmare. Tax time is coming up here in the US. Yay.

Another music distrib concept is Weedshare, which uses Windows Media Audio to allow you 3 plays before you buy, and encourages people to distribute the music far and wide by file sharing, hosting, and whatever they want. Steve Turnidge of Weedshare suggested to me that I weedify some Smokin' Granny music (hey Steve!). This is not a bad idea, but unfortunately it doesn't fit the BitWorks rule: "do things as simply as possible". That's the only way it can survive, along with being 0.7% evil. Weedshare also has a version of multilevel marketing, where people who share the music also get a percentage of resulting sales.

There are too many huge music download sites to mention. Most of them have the same tragic flaw: too much crap. I haven't even mentioned the whole "DRM sucks" issue or the other shortcomings of download sites. I could write a book. It would be boring.