Another gift from a stranger which I'd neglected until now. The stranger in question is John Buckman, founder and boss of Magnatune, and the event was an informal dinner in a Vietnamese restaurant on Old Street, under the auspices of the Pho email list. This was 2005.
I'd heard about Magnatune a couple of years previously, when a freelance music writer told me that he thought their model was the most promising reinvention of the record label. After the dinner I interviewed John for my book, and here's what I wrote:
Magnatune is an independent record label that licenses recordings of all its artists under Creative Commons, so that you can hear them, in full and for free, on its website. In four years [this was published four years ago] it has released music from 200 artists, using blogs, social networks, and word of mouth to help promote the site and its artists. As John Buckman, Magnatune founder, puts it, "the main marketing technique is getting people to listen to our music, whether as full-album previews on the site, or our own [online] radio stations and podcasts, or via other people’s podcasts and their web sites."
Imagine that you make podcasts, a form of audio blogging using downloadable files instead of text, and would like to include music in them, either as background or as a feature in your discussion. Magnatune grants you a free license to use any of its music in your podcasts for free, even if this use is "commercial-but-poor" (which is defined as making a gross profit from podcast-related activities of less than $1,000 per year). These podcasts are the equivalent of the insects that carry your seeds far and wide, so it's best to make those seeds as light and sticky as possible.
Of course, not everything can be free, but Magnatune makes even commercial licensing of its music — for ads, films, compilations, and such like — as straightforward as possible. No haggling between lawyers — you identify the music you want from the website, and then step through an online "wizard" process that concludes with you being sent a valid legal agreement and a CD-quality version of the music.
The combination of ease of listening and ease of licensing was the unique selling point. Nowadays, with all the streaming services, the first half of that equation isn't so unique: most music, aside from some of the specialist stuff I like, can be heard before you buy. But the licensing probably still sets Magnatune apart, and makes it a natural destination for small, independent media producers, from filmmakers to podcasters.
Does Magnatune make any money for itself or its artists? I don't know. I guess the latter wouldn't stay, or keep coming, if it didn't work for them (though deals with Magnatune are non-exclusive). John Buckman got a nice return from selling Lyris a decade or so ago. I get the sense he's in Magnatune for the long haul and doesn't need to pay off a mortgage. Along the way he's joined the board of Creative Commons and founded the not-for-profit Bookmooch, so he's clearly got an eye on the bigger picture.
The music? I guess the Americans aren't as squeamish as we are about "New Age". Happily there's nothing here that smells too strongly of the shiatsu parlour, and I like Kourosh Zolani's piece quite a lot. This is the first I've heard of Trip Wamsley's solo material — he also records with Steve Lawson, and it's immediately evident that they're ploughing the same field. The few jazz tracks at the end are… not really my kind of jazz.
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