Along similar lines as infidelity offsets, a new website called Music Donations allows you to appease your guilt about copying music by making donations directly to artists. As they say on their site:

You are still guilty of a crime whenever you copy, download or pirate music, but at least the artist receives money from your donation and you can feel better from making that donation to them.

A nice idea, maybe, but the way their system is set up at the moment suffers from a huge credibility problem — how do I know the money that I donate really gets passed on to the artist? It’s not like I can email Robbie Williams and ask him whether he received my five dollars. I guess an intermediary is useful, because it would be quite troublesome to find the necessary information to actually send five dollars to Robbie. So Music Donations can fill the gap by collecting this information and exploiting economies of scale in transaction costs. However, I’d be much happier if Robbie at least had a link to it from his site, or there was some way of auditing the donations, or something to make it more transparent. I don’t recommend using this service at all given the way it’s set up at the moment, because I’m highly suspicious that it’s actually a scam.

November 28, 2007, by aaron. Permalink. Comments RSS.
Posted in Business models, File sharing, Music.