Case-study of Magnatune: CC-licensed, podcaster-friendly successful record label

Michael Holloway from the Open Rights Group conducted a fantastic, in-depth business-analysis of Magnatune, the open/free commercial record label that uses free, Creative Commons licensed music to sell commercial licenses. Magnatune has blazed a lot of new trail -- especially in "secondary" genres like classical (Magnatune has experienced 20 percent annual growth in classical sales at a time when industry-wide classical sales have fallen 90 percent).

Magnatune’s most popular genre by far — with 30% of sales — is classical, followed by new age, electronica and rock, which represent around 10% of sales each. The classical market is in serious decline: In 1980, classical recordings comprised 20% of the industry’s revenue, which dropped to 2% by 2000, and to 0.75% in 2006. Yet Magnatune has seen 20% growth annually since autumn 2003.

John recognises that obscurity is a musician’s biggest hurdle, and his innovative approach to overcoming it is to provide ‘open music’, which is “shareable, available in ‘source code’ form, allows derivative works and is free of cost for non-commercial use.”

Shareable: Users are invited to share their purchased tracks with up to three friends, can listen to the entire catalogue for free via the website’s 128kbps streams, and can download any song as a 128kbps MP3 file.

Available as ‘source code’: Ten per cent of the catalogue is also available in its component parts, e.g. scores, lyrics, MIDI files, samples or track-by-track audio files.

Derivative works: The CC licence used by Magnatune explicitly permits users to make derivative works - such as remixes, cover songs and sampling - for non-commercial purposes, which is further facilitated by the provision of the ‘source code’.

Free for non-commercial use: Users can download songs for non-commercial projects, such as a home video soundtrack or compilation album intended for family or friends.

Link

[#1 posted by sarang , April 11, 2008 10:54 AM]

I've been listening to Magnatunes ever since I randomly clicked its streaming radio from shoutcast. they have a really interesting selection of music from around the world and really are trying to "do the right thing" for the musicians. you are allowed to spend as much as you think the track or album is worth and the majority of it goes to the artist. I'm glad its getting coverage here!

[#2 posted by Walt , April 11, 2008 12:05 PM]

I'm very happy to hear Magnatune's doing well. Why, just yesterday I downloaded a couple classical albums! Some of my most favorite albums I first heard on Magnatune over iTunes radio.

[#3 posted by holtt , April 11, 2008 1:21 PM]

Magnatune is indeed awesome. With their permission, I have used their content in some not-for-profit computer games developed at a university. Very nice to see them getting some BoingBoing lovin'

[#4 posted by tcforest , April 11, 2008 5:50 PM]

Users of Amarok have Magnatunes built in, very cool.

[#5 posted by nhnFreespirit , April 12, 2008 4:30 AM]

#4, The Magnatune store integration in the stable 1.4 series of Amarok is working pretty well, but for the upcomming 2.0 release, we are taking this integration to a whole new level, making it much more smooth and fully featured. Check out http://kollide.net/~nhnfreespirit/pics/Amarok%202%20screen%20-%2020080331.png for a ( slightly ) old screenshot of the version of Amarok in development

[#6 posted by tcforest , April 12, 2008 6:29 AM]

#5 Thanks for that link,

i'm a big fan of Amarok, IMHO the best music client around (is that the term?)