Comments for Towards an ethical music downloading?

I do not totally agree with Charlotte in her last paragraph. There are some searching costs involved as soon as you decide to donate to charity. I myself do not know at all where to begin with: which organization to donate to, to which amount. Moreover, while Greenpeace is pissing me off grabbing me on the street to donate while you do not get a clue where you money goes to. Here, you have three major advantages: first, you get a product in exchange, secondly: you know where your money goes to; thirdly, your searching costs decrease.
However, I have some doubts about the viability of their business model. Like most of you said, there are some major competitors who offer music for free. So I believe that their target should be the “ethically music downloaders”. I wonder what the size of the target is. But keep on going, let us hope for them that downloaders will get more conscious in the following years.
Moreover, one of the major advantages is that the artist is actually retributed for his work. They should find some artists to support their cause to try and divert some of the free downloaders to their site. I think that could be a great marketing point.

Good initiative. More money can be earned by allowing advertisers to attach their own artwork to each and every song. I must mention here that artwork thumbnails, attached to every song can be a very effective way to advertise, given the fact that they get displayed prominently on ipods, mp3 players, PC music players etc.
I must confess that I did not know about this site. With more than 8.5 million songs and the prospect that at least 4% of our money goes to charity, I think this site must be around the top of our recommendation lists.

I think that the creation of this implementation is a good initiative. This kind of innovation which is related to charity is always appreciated by consumers and supported by associations. Moreover, it is a good way to tackle illegal downloads because people are sensitive and feel good when they have acted in a good way for social causes.
But I agree with Charles, uncertainty remains. We cannot be certain how this platform is really working. Indeed, the creators must have a personal interest in creating it, they firstly have to ensure revenues and success. And this success is guaranteed because of the advertising in promoting this platform: in using it, we are not only fighting against illegal downloads, but also we support causes. In this way, it is really easy to attract consumers.
I’m not personally convinced by the benefit of this platform. How can we be sure that our money is actually going in favor of charities? I think that the main difficulty the creator will have to deal with is the faith of the consumers. I assume that lot of people will think in this way: those creators are really smart innovators, but if i want to contribute in social causes in investing in charity, i would prefer to do it by myself and I do not want to take the risk and pass by people whose main objective is to make their business profitable.

The idea of the fairsharemusic.com platform is great, but whether success will be achieved remains uncertain.

The biggest advantage of the platform is obviously to offer a new incentive for end-user to pay to listen legally music. Hence a new opportunity to get money back into the music industry. And maybe such incentive will help recess piracy as the new platform has strong premises: every single buck redirected to a good cause is worthy, and might help other people.

However this platform is not without weaknesses… I see mainly two of them which are explained hereafter:

(1) It is a new downloading platform to get used to, aside to the more commonly accepted Amazon and iTunes ecosystems. If the buying experience is not at least the same as other legal alternatives, I don’t think the “charity” part will be enough to attract new end-users (even more if they are strong illegal downloaders). And for now the track portfolio of fairsharemusic.com is smaller and less accessible than its alternatives.

A successful platform such as iTunes offering a “charity” system might have more incentive power than fairsharemusic.com. And even proposing such system for a short period of time might turn newcomers into the legal downloading era, the point also being to educate people. It won’t be the first time we will see Apple participating to a charity initiative (cf. the iPod Nano Red).

(2) Donating directly to foundations such as the British Red Cross or Amnesty International might be more beneficial to the end-user for tax-deduction reasons.

From a corporate social responsibility point of view, this website is effective. It makes me feel guilty about downloading elsewhere and thus succeeds as an effective marketing strategy. However, when I went through the processes to purchase an album, only 3.75% of the total cost was going towards a charity. On top of this, the cost was not significantly lower than what I would pay in a music store or at the iTunes store.

Personally, I would be more likely to use Spotify or Deezer where you can listen to music for free. As Tung Le Van Thanh said earlier “it is not illegal because they pay the royalties with ads on their website or between 2 songs”. I would not mind listening to short adds (like on the radio) as “payment” for downloading and creating my own playlist.