Magnatune is an American
independent record label
An independent record label (or indie label) is a record label that operates without the funding or distribution of major record labels; they are a type of small- to medium-sized enterprise, or SME. The labels and artists are often represented ...
based in
Berkeley, California
Berkeley ( ) is a city on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay in northern Alameda County, California, United States. It is named after the 18th-century Irish bishop and philosopher George Berkeley. It borders the cities of Oakland and Emer ...
, founded in spring 2003.
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
Amazon.com, Inc. ( ) is an American multinational technology company focusing on e-commerce, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence. It has been referred to as "one of the most influential econo ...
. 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.
Magnatune was the first record label to license music online and as of May 2015 had sold over 7,000 licenses in its twelve years of existence.
Overview
Magnatune makes non-exclusive agreements with artists and gives them fifty percent of any proceeds from online sales or licensing. These kinds of policies were very unusual for a record label in 2003–2004. Users can
stream or download music in
MP3
MP3 (formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany, with support from other digital scientists in the United States and elsewhere. Origin ...
format (no
DRM
DRM may refer to:
Government, military and politics
* Defense reform movement, U.S. campaign inspired by Col. John Boyd
* Democratic Republic of Madagascar, a former socialist state (1975–1992) on Madagascar
* Direction du renseignement milita ...
) without charge before choosing whether to buy or not. (Some MP3s available for free download have Magnatune advertisements in them.) 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.
Customers may download music they have purchased in
WAV
Waveform Audio File Format (WAVE, or WAV due to its filename extension; pronounced "wave") is an audio file format standard, developed by IBM and Microsoft, for storing an audio bitstream on PCs. It is the main format used on Microsoft Wind ...
,
FLAC, MP3,
Ogg Vorbis
Vorbis is a free and open-source software project headed by the Xiph.Org Foundation. The project produces an audio coding format and software reference encoder/decoder (codec) for lossy audio compression. Vorbis is most commonly used in conjun ...
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 actually encourage buyers to share up to three copies with friends.
All of the tracks downloaded free of charge are licensed under the
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License. Even though using liberal licensing is not a new idea in itself, Magnatune is one of the first and most visible companies to try to build a business in music around this idea.
Founder
John Buckman is founder of Magnatune. 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 A for-profit corporation is an organization which aims to earn profit through its operations and is concerned with its own interests, unlike those of the public (non-profit corporation).
Structure
A for-profit corporation is usually an organization ...
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 and in February 2010 was appointed chairman of the board. In April 2015 Buckman launched