Several years ago I worked on a web site where I won an award for the best site in the state but it got shut down. I was pretty disappointed when this happened. Actually I am still a bit disappointed. The idea was actually fairly simple. Pulling it off correctly was the hard part.

Several years have passed since then so I can give an easier explanation than I used to be able to.

Mashup Facebook and iTunes and you get the basics. People create a profile, upload music, price it, sell it, but receive ALL the money from their sales. How does this work? Simple.. you take fantastic design and you take out everything obstacle that you can between bands and fans. OK it “sounds” simple conceptually but will it work? Why did the site get shut down?

YES it WILL work.. And I’m quite surprised that Facebook has not already done this but then again Mark doesn’t like advertisements so I can sorta see why. In order to return all the money to the bands you need to have something in place to pay for the time and efforts of the designers and programmers and you have to worry about other overhead like bandwidth and credit card transaction fees. When you get into small .99 cent payments you are talking about what they call “micro-payments”. It can be a bit of a bitch to figure out how all the taxes work when you are distributing all over the world in different currency. However it can be done and HAS been done.

Ok so back to the question why is it down? We had 3 big issues. 1. We had no damn funding.. 2. We almost overcame that with ads but since we were developing the site from the same IP that we hosted the site on Google blacklisted us for click farming.. which we WERE NOT doing.. however trying getting an appeal as a small start up company… 3. The main programmer fell desperately in love and ran off and got married.

Since we were small (2 people).. that made it pretty much impossible to continue. Had I been a man of slightly more means I would have sought out private funding to continue myself but I had to quickly get a job or starve. And people wonder why the rich get richer and the poor get poorer

But none of this horrible crap needs to happen to you. I don’t see any reason why someone won’t go ahead with this idea and make music more acceptable to the masses, put more bucks in the bands pockets and let them get on with making music instead of waiting tables…

These big RIAA people like to say that people are jacking the musicians when we all know that when you download some music off some torrent site you aren’t really taking anything out of the bands pockets.. The record labels have already done that for you! That’s why people don’t give a shit when they download the latest thing by Metalica or something. Like they are starving… But what if they were? Exactly!

Out of all the people who love that band most of them would not be able to get music because Metalica wouldn’t be making it. They’d be scraping up a living looking to get signed by a major label like most people do.

I pretty sure I’m not alone in saying that when I turn on the radio all I hear are the same few songs over and over again. That’s incredibly lame with the HUGE amount of content out there. But back to people who are digging this starving band and the people who don’t know about it. Lets take Pandora for example… If there is a well known band like Metalica that I enjoy I can put it in and I’ll find other bands like them. I won’t however find the guys who have a kickass garage band but never get any publicity because they play in some small local scene.

But with this mashup of tech we can do all of the above. We can have a social networking site where people sell stuff and the money goes to the two parties without the website even taking any loot as middle man. We can have unknown bands being suggested based upon what you already like. AND we can make money running a super cool website that TOTALLY changed the music industry.. I always thought it was strange that it was called an “industry” anyway…

So why the hell am I telling you all this?? Cause I’d like to see someone do this still!! Even if it is not me. I’d be a great asset to a team though if you decide to do this and want the help give me a call for sure! But even if if it isn’t me.. I really don’t care. This is just too proper of an idea to get sucked up by some already large monopolistic corporation. I know I run the risk of someone from Facebook, Google, Microsoft etc. reading this blog and going forward with the idea but whatever. I can’t just leave it boxed up forever in my brain waiting for a spark.

The really nice thing about this concept is that if you DO manage to get this up before one of the big guys you actually have a really nice chance of doing ok. Facebook doesn’t like ads so they’d have to explain all that. Most people don’t trust MS enough to think they aren’t just trying to “take over” the music industry.. not really change much, take a percentage etc. That would be like Myspace vs Facebook. Everyone left myspace since they didn’t have to look at horrible eye stabbing ads and gfx. Besides if MS got ahold of it they would try to squeeze more out of it than we’re talking here and that just won’t fly. Google is the biggest threat to this idea because they control the ads anyway!

So if I had to bet on a social network site where you could sell stuff and all that I’d say Google would be the one. But I’d really like to see someone else do it. I don’t hate Google but I mean shit.. they are already HUGE.. 400 people own 90 some percent of the wealth in this country.. it needs to be a little more spread out. And this is not an idea that will make you nice and wealthy… this will make you filthy rich… they don’t need that.

I don’t allow comments on this site but you can always email me at bstone@bradleystone.com or give me a call at the number on www.bradleystone.com to talk about it. And hey if you go off and run with this idea and get insane rich.. throw me a bone… I’m extremely poor and live in a trailer (seriously)! If you don’t you are a dick but I knew dick heads could read this almost as well as normal people. Tis what it tis.

Brad