Tuesday, March 6, 2007

Download Barenaked Ladies New Album With No DRM and No Cost (for now...)

As Cory has alluded to in the past, the Barenaked Ladies have decided to experiment with releasing an album free of charge and without any DRM wrappers. Techcruch's Michael Arrington reports that the album will be available through "Amiestreet," a new website with an audacious and unique business model:
I’ve been writing about the Amie Street music site since their launch last July. Their model has the potential to disrupt the music industry from the bottom up: Bands and labels upload music, which is downloadable in DRM-free MP3 format. The price always starts at free, and as more people download the song, the price starts to rise, eventually hitting $.98. Higher priced songs are by definition more popular, and I’ve found that anything over $.50 or so is pretty good music. 70% of proceeds go to the band/label, and Amie Street keeps the rest.

The service is now starting to make real progress with labels, too. They’ve signed a deal with Nettwerk Music Group, which will be uploading their entire library to Amie Street over the next few months. The first music to go up on the site is the new Barenaked Ladies album, Barenaked Ladies Are Men. All sixteen songs from the album are available here.

So, if anyone out there is looking to get some good (legal) music for cheap make sure that you head over to Amie Street before the whole things gets too popular.

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