Magnatune is an American independent record label 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 E ...

, 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 Decent Espresso, 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?" and the author of an article in Linux Journal entitled "Magnatune, an Open Music Experiment."

Integration with media players

Magnatune has an

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable ...

API An application programming interface (API) is a way for two or more computer programs to communicate with each other. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how ...

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 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. Rhythmbox is designed to work well under GNOME, but can function on other desktop environments. I ...

0.9.7 added this functionality in December 2006. A

Slim Devices Slim Devices, Inc. was a consumer electronics company based in Mountain View, California, United States. Their main product was the Squeezebox network music player which connects to a home ethernet or Wi-Fi network, and allows the owner to stream d ...

plugin for

Logitech Media Server Logitech Media Server (formerly SlimServer, SqueezeCenter and Squeezebox Server) is a streaming audio server supported by Logitech (formerly Slim Devices), developed in particular to support their Squeezebox range of digital audio receivers. The ...

is available. A plugin for

Songbird A songbird is a bird belonging to the suborder Passeri of the perching birds (Passeriformes). Another name that is sometimes seen as the scientific or vernacular name is Oscines, from Latin ''oscen'', "songbird". The Passeriformes contains 5000 ...

is also available.

Clementine A clementine (''Citrus × clementina'') is a tangor, a citrus fruit hybrid between a willowleaf mandarin orange ( ''C.'' × ''deliciosa'') and a sweet orange (''C. × sinensis''), named in honor of Clément Rodier, a French missionary who fir ...

added support for Magnatune in version 0.4.

References

External links

Magnatune official site

Magnatuneasy
Easy Way Magnatune with rss {{Authority control Ambient music record labels Classical music record labels Companies based in Berkeley, California Creative Commons-licensed works Electronic music record labels Free music American independent record labels Netlabels Online music stores of the United States Record labels established in 2003 Rock record labels World music record labels

Overview

Founder

Integration with media players

See also

References

External links