New music download service will give 100% of royalties to artists

by Staff, Brand Republic 28-Jul-08, 10:00

LONDON - A new music download service is promising to give 100% of the sale of each track to the labels or unsigned artists who produced the music.

Rawrip is designed to let music lovers listen to tracks that they like and discover artists who are less well known, via a piece of technology called The Rippler.

This analyses tracks on 30 different criteria and then suggests other music that is similar to that requested. For example, a band whose sound is influenced by Radiohead will come up when a user requests a Radiohead track.

Music is streamed through the Rawrip website, and some tracks are available to download for free. Others will be sold, with 100% of the revenue going to the artist or label.

There will also be a widget that artists can use on their MySpace or Facebook pages via which they can sell tracks.Rawrip will fund all of this via advertising on its website, which will act as a social networking site for music lovers.

Unsigned artists will benefit from software that allows them to see where their fan base lies and to target these people.

Vartan Sarkissian, founder of Rawrip, said: "Who said musicians should be poor? At Rawrip we're helping to create a new form of digital distribution which puts the artist right at the centre.

"We even incur the cost of the sale, we allow the artist to leave any time they want, and have made the service non-exclusive."

Rawrip is currently in beta form, and has a catalogue of 1m songs from 60,000 artists. It launches officially in November 2008.

Comments

Stephanie Courtney - 28/07/2008

If it works, I will support it 100%. The music bizz has been bass ackwards for far too long, and the one thing I hate about iTunes is that the musicians get screwed royally out of their royalties. Viva la music revelution!