Bittunes
Description
Bittunes is a project to create an 'Independent Digital Music Market'
The vision for this project is about using the best aspects of peer-to-peer file-sharing technology often rightly called ‘super distribution’, and fusing that with the latest technology in digital payment systems, to radically change the way the technology has been applied so that ordinary people actually earn money by becoming the new distribution channel for digital music. To achieve this will not be easy, but the end result could be nothing short of revolutionary.
Industry Context
The music industry has been constrained both by its structure, and by the technologies used to record and distribute it over the past 100+ years. Archaic copyright rules neither protect musicians, nor do they recognize the unique social properties of music. The fundamental nature of what music is, industry greed, and improper use of modern technologies to try to restrict how music is played and used have contributed to falling sales, and artists being ever more poorly compensated in order to protect the business models of the big labels.
Bittunes was created to address these problems and leverage the power of the internet and p2p technology to create the first global independent music market that puts control back in the hands of the musicians and their fans, and rewards rather than penalizes the network for helping to spread the music to everyone who wants to hear it.
Characteristics of the System
There is a role for some key centralized aspects in the bittunes system and these are the various key functions of the bittunes.com website, effectively sitting in the middle of the distributed network. Bittunes.com will provide top 100's in various music genres and sub-categories. Artists will have their own 'account page' that shows various statistics, i.e. earnings, account balance, where their tracks are currently ranked on the top 100's system. The top 100’s effectively represent the ‘head’ of the Bittunes ‘Long Tail’ of Independent Digital Music, and this in an important attribute of the system.