Wise Buddha

As mentioned back in February Songbird is an interesting music player from the Firefox guys. So interesting in fact that they have just secured additional funding from a couple of seasoned VC’s who obviously see the potential.
In other music related news we mentioned a couple of months ago really innovative DRM free music site called Amie Street well they have just announced their Beta launch, the new site is still a bit rough but well worth checking out. Since covering the service in July their user base has increased to around 4,000 users. They have had a couple hundred artists participating in the alpha selling around 2,100 songs.

Their business model is a demand-driven pricing model, songs uploaded by artists fluctuate in price according to demand over time. Users get recommendation tokens for each dollar they put into the system and get free credits if the songs they recommend rise in price. Artists receive around 70% of sales proceeds.

Some other sites pushing the DRM free model are Sellaband, the free listening with heavy DRM of SpiralFrog, the 77 cent tracks with DRM and 88 cent versions without from PayPlay.fm

As we have mentioned Wise Buddha Towers is a DRM free zone, music is too expensive, DRM is too restrictive and major labels (instead of the artists) are taking too much of the money we spend on music.