fair music weblog

BeatPick, “the FairPlay Music Label”, as they call themselves, is one of the rare examples of new business models for music distribution that try to balance the interests of artists, producers, customers and marketers. But the number is growing.

BeatPick, with offices in London and Rome, offers digital downloads of music without DRM in CD-quality WAV, high quality mp3 and OGG. The music is released under the Creative Commons license Attribution-NonCommercial- Sharealike 2.5, which means that non-commercial projects can remix and sample the music for free, as long as they attribute the name of the creator and give the results to others under the same conditions. Customers can listen to a whole album for free online, downloads have a fixed price of 6€/7$ for an album and can be re-downloaded any time. BeatPick splits earnings 50/50 with their artists who maintain full ownership of their creations.
Musicians can submit their works to BeatPick any time. BeatPick guarantees that the music will be listened to within 20 days. An agreement with BeatPick is non-exclusive and can be terminated anytime in 30 days, the artists are paid 4 times per year. Besides running the online shop they try as well to license artist’s music for commercial purposes such as movies, video art, games, TV advertising, DJ compilations and the like.

David d’Atri about the interesting genesis of Beatpick, that went live in spring 2006:

“BeatPick is a project that started in 2003 during my Master in Business Economics. In my dissertation A paper on economic efficiency and the infringement of copyright in the music industry: An Insight into the Future of the Music Industry I showed that a decrease of copyright rigidities in the music industry could lead to an increase in total welfare. ”

Beatpick flatters Magnatune business model - Creative Commons Blog