Magnatune

Last updated
Magnatune
Magnatune.svg
Founded2003 (2003)[ citation needed ]
FounderJohn Buckman
Country of originU.S.
Location Berkeley, California
Official website www.magnatune.com

Magnatune is an American independent record label based in Berkeley, California, founded in spring 2003. [1] It only sold music for download through its website but added a print-CD-on-demand service in late 2004 and in October 2007 began selling complete albums and individual tracks through Amazon.com.[ citation needed ] In May 2008, Magnatune launched all-you-can-eat membership plans. From March 2010 Magnatune dropped the CD printing service and moved exclusively to all-you-can-eat membership plans. [2] Magnatune was the first record label to license music online [3] and as of May 2015 had sold over 7,000 licenses in its twelve years of existence. [4]

Contents

In 2024, Magnatune announced that it was no longer offering new subscriptions or licenses, or trading of any kind. However, some music would still be available for free, via its site to listen to. [5]

Overview

Magnatune makes non-exclusive agreements with artists and gives them 50% of any proceeds from online sales or licensing. [6] These kinds of policies were very unusual for a record label in 2003–2004.[ citation needed ] Users can stream or download music in MP3 format (no DRM) without charge before choosing whether to buy or not. (Some MP3s available for free download have Magnatune advertisements in them.) [7] Buyers used to be able to purchase individual albums and choose their own price, from US$5 to $18 per album, but in March 2010 Magnatune moved to a subscriptions-only business model, where buyers have to purchase a monthly subscription (with a three-month minimum) under which they can download as much music as they like from Magnatune. [2] Customers may download music they have purchased in WAV, FLAC, MP3, Ogg Vorbis and AAC encoding formats. Music files sold by Magnatune do not use any form of digital rights management to prevent customers from making copies of music files they have purchased; Magnatune encourages buyers to share up to three copies with friends. [8]

All of the tracks downloaded free of charge are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License.[ citation needed ] Even though using liberal licensing is not a new idea in itself, Magnatune is one of the first companies to try to build a business in music around this idea.[ citation needed ]

Founder

John Buckman is founder of Magnatune. [9] In 1994, Buckman and his ex-wife Jan Hanford founded Lyris Technologies. Buckman was CEO and primary programmer of Lyris' product line: Lyris ListServer, MailShield, and MailEngine. He sold the company in June 2005. In August 2006, he launched the for-profit corporation BookMooch, an online community for the exchange of used books, which—in combination with his work with Magnatune—has associated Buckman with the Free Culture movement. In September 2007, he was elected to the Board of Directors of the Electronic Frontier Foundation [10] and in February 2010 was appointed chairman of the board. [11] In April 2015 Buckman launched Decent Espresso, [12] a company that is designing a new home espresso machine.

Buckman is the co-author of an article in SysAdmin Magazine (later acquired by Dr. Dobbs) entitled "Which OS is Fastest for High-Performance Network Applications?" [13] and the author of an article in Linux Journal entitled "Magnatune, an Open Music Experiment." [14]

Integration with media players

Magnatune has an XML API that has made integration within media players possible. Amarok (from version 1.4.4, released in October 2006) allows users to preview and buy music from all signed artists from within the application. Rhythmbox 0.9.7 added this functionality in December 2006. A Slim Devices plugin for Logitech Media Server is available. [15] A plugin for Songbird is also available. [16] Clementine added support for Magnatune in version 0.4. [17]

See also

Related Research Articles

Lightworks is a freemium non-linear editing system (NLE) for editing and mastering digital video. It was an early developer of computer-based non-linear editing systems, and has been in development since 1998. The development of an open-source version was announced on April 11, 2010. However, no source code of the program has been released. In July 2020, a Lightworks product manager confirmed that they "still hope to announce something in the future" about Lightworks' open source development.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Winamp</span> Media player for Microsoft Windows

Winamp is a media player for Microsoft Windows originally developed by Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev by their company Nullsoft, which they later sold to AOL in 1999 for $80 million. It was then acquired by Radionomy in 2014, now known as the Llama Group. Since version 2, it has been sold as freemium and supports extensibility with plug-ins and skins, and features music visualization, playlist and a media library, supported by a large online community.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Free music</span> Music in the public domain or under a free license

Free music or libre music is music that, like free software, can freely be copied, distributed and modified for any purpose. Thus free music is either in the public domain or licensed under a free license by the artist or copyright holder themselves, often as a method of promotion. It does not mean that there should be no fee involved. The word free refers to freedom, not to price.

iTunes Store Digital media store

The iTunes Store is a digital media store operated by Apple Inc. which opened on April 28, 2003. As of April 2020, iTunes offered 60 million songs, 2.2 million apps, 25,000 TV shows, and 65,000 films. The iTunes Store is available on most home and portable Apple devices, as well as some platforms by other companies. The store opened as part of then-CEO Steve Jobs' push to open a digital marketplace for music; when it opened, it was the only legal digital catalog of music to offer songs from all five major record labels, which played a part in its success and influence in the music downloading business. While initially a dominant player in digital media, by the mid-2010s, streaming media services were generating more revenue than the buy-to-own model used by the iTunes Store; Apple now operates its own subscription-based streaming music service, Apple Music, alongside the iTunes Store.

Last.fm is a music website founded in the United Kingdom in 2002. Utilizing a music recommender system known as "Audioscrobbler," Last.fm creates a detailed profile of each user's musical preferences by recording the details of the tracks they listen to, whether from Internet radio stations or from the user's computer or portable music devices. This information is transferred ("scrobbled") to Last.fm's database via the music player or through a plug-in installed in the user's music player. The data is then displayed on the user's profile page and compiled to create reference pages for individual artists.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rhythmbox</span> Free and open source audio player

Rhythmbox is a free and open-source audio player software, tag editor and music organizer for digital audio files on Linux and Unix-like systems.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Google Desktop</span> Computer program

Google Desktop was a computer program with desktop search capabilities, created by Google for Linux, Apple Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows systems. It allowed text searches of a user's email messages, computer files, music, photos, chats, web pages viewed, and the ability to display "Google Gadgets" on the user's desktop in a sidebar.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Amarok (software)</span> Free and open source music player

Amarok is a free and open-source music player for Linux, macOS, Windows, and other Unix-like operating systems. Amarok is part of the KDE project, but it is released independently of the central KDE Software Compilation release cycle. Amarok is released under the terms of the GPL-2.0-or-later.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paint.NET</span> Freeware graphics editor

Paint.NET is a freeware general-purpose raster graphics editor program for Microsoft Windows, developed with the .NET platform. Paint.NET was originally created by Rick Brewster as a Washington State University student project, and has evolved from a simple replacement for the Microsoft Paint program into a program for editing mainly graphics, with support for plugins.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Songbird (software)</span> Music player

Songbird is a discontinued music player originally released in early 2006 with the stated mission "to incubate Songbird, the first Web player, to catalyze and champion a diverse, open Media Web".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">REAPER</span> Digital audio workstation by Cockos

REAPER is a digital audio workstation, MIDI sequencer and video editing software application created by Cockos. The current version is available for Microsoft Windows, macOS, and Linux. REAPER acts as a host to most industry-standard plug-in formats and can import all commonly used media formats, including video. REAPER and its included plug-ins are available in 32-bit and 64-bit format.

Amazon Music is a music streaming platform and digital music store operated by Amazon. As of January 2020, the service had 55 million subscribers.

Digital rights management (DRM) is the management of legal access to digital content. Various tools or technological protection measures (TPM), such as access control technologies, can restrict the use of proprietary hardware and copyrighted works. DRM technologies govern the use, modification and distribution of copyrighted works and of systems that enforce these policies within devices. DRM technologies include licensing agreements and encryption.

Jamendo is a Luxembourg-based music website and an open community of independent artists and music lovers. A subsidiary of Belgian company Llama Group, and Independent Management Entity (IME) since 2019.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ubuntu One</span> Cloud service operated by Canonical Ltd.

Ubuntu One is an OpenID-based single sign-on service operated by Canonical Ltd. to allow users to log onto many Canonical-owned Web sites. Until April 2014, Ubuntu One was also a file hosting service and music store that allowed users to store data "in the cloud".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nightingale (software)</span> Open source audio player

Nightingale is a discontinued free, open source audio player based on the Songbird media player source code. As such, Nightingale's engine is based on the Mozilla XULRunner with libraries such as the GStreamer media framework and libtag providing media tagging and playback support, amongst others.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sublime Text</span> Text editor

Sublime Text is a text and source code editor available for Windows, macOS, and Linux. It natively supports many programming languages and markup languages. Users can customize it with themes and expand its functionality with plugins, typically community-built and maintained under free-software licenses. To facilitate plugins, Sublime Text features a Python API. The editor utilizes minimal interface and contains features for programmers including configurable syntax highlighting, code folding, search-and-replace supporting regular-expressions, terminal output window, and more. It is proprietary software, but a free, non-time-limited evaluation version is available.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Privacy Badger</span> Browser extension

Privacy Badger is a free and open-source browser extension for Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Edge, Brave, Opera, and Firefox for Android created by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). Its purpose is to promote a balanced approach to internet privacy between consumers and content providers by blocking advertisements and tracking cookies that do not respect the Do Not Track setting in a user's web browser. A second purpose, served by free distribution, has been to encourage membership in and donation to the EFF.

Emby is a media server designed to organize, play, and stream audio and video to a variety of devices. Emby's source code was mostly open with some closed-source components as of August 2017, releases of the software published via the Emby website are however proprietary and cannot be replicated from source due to the build scripts also being proprietary. As of version 3.5.3 Emby has been relicensed and is now closed-source, while open source components will be moved to plugins. Due to this, a free open source fork of Emby was created called Jellyfin. Emby uses a client–server model.

References

  1. ↑ "Hear no evil". The Economist . 15 September 2005. Retrieved 20 January 2013.
  2. 1 2 John Buckman (2010-03-17). "Magnatune blog: New Business Model for Magnatune". Blogs.magnatune.com. Retrieved 2016-11-13.
  3. ↑ "License music from". Magnatune. Retrieved 2016-11-13.
  4. ↑ "Music Licensing at Magnatune". Magnatune. Retrieved 2016-11-13.
  5. ↑ "Magnatune: a music service that isn't evil". magnatune.com. Retrieved 2024-08-25.
  6. ↑ Linux Journal, issue 118. (2004-02-01). "Magnatune, an Open Music Experiment (Archived)". Archived from the original on 2019-07-01.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  7. ↑ John Buckman (2011-02-05). "Magnatune blog: Short adverts". Blog.magnatune.com. Retrieved 2016-11-13.
  8. ↑ Magnatune. "Give 3 Free Copies to Your Friends".
  9. ↑ John, Buckman. "Founder's Rant". Magnatune: Founder's Rant. Retrieved 2024-08-29.
  10. ↑ "Two Leading Technologists Join EFF Board of Directors". Electronic Frontier Foundation. Archived from the original on 2008-07-06. Retrieved 2016-12-04.
  11. ↑ "10 Year Term of EFF Chairman Winds Down with EFF's 20th Anniversary Tonight". Electronic Frontier Foundation. 10 February 2010.
  12. ↑ NYTM (30 April 2015). "ZPM Espresso and the Rage of the Jilted Crowdfunder". The New York Times.
  13. ↑ Buckman, John & Rothman, Jeffrey B. (2001). "Which OS is Fastest for High-Performance Network Applications?". Sys Admin Magazine.
  14. ↑ Buckman, John (2004). "Magnatune, an Open Music Experiment". Linux Journal.
  15. ↑ "Magnatune for SqueezeCenter download | SourceForge.net". Magnaslim.sourceforge.net. Archived from the original on 2008-09-27. Retrieved 2016-11-13.
  16. ↑ "Songbird Add-ons". Archived from the original on 2008-05-03. Retrieved 2008-05-02.
  17. ↑ "GitHub – clementine-player/Clementine: Clementine Music Player". Code.google.com. Retrieved 2016-11-13.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.