Yesterday I wrote about how much I admire Android’s business model of using the Internet to share information to promote collaboration and build a better product and/or better serve customers.
Well this morning I read a great article in The Irish Times about Cash Music. Cash Music is the Coalition of Artists and Stake Holders. It was set up by Kristin Hersh (who I loved in The Throwing Muses) and Donna Sparks (formerly in L7). It’s a web site where independent artists can sell their music on a pay-what-you-want basis. (You can also sponsor an artist on a quarterly basis.)
The cool thing is that artists invite collaboration by allowing each song to be available using the Creative Commons license. Which means that fans that are more musically inclined that me can remix, re-record, add tracks, or otherwise use or modify the song. They can pretty much do anything short or selling the song.
Why Cash Music? The quote (I saw, it rotates) on their homepage says it all:
Either all the record companies will get together or the industry will fall apart and someone like Microsoft will come in and buy one of the companies at wholesale and do what needs to be done.”
— Rick Rubin
I think this is such a great example of what we can do now with broadband that we couldn’t do before. And again a great example of how broadband has forced/facilitated new business models.
