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This is the service of a company called Weedshare—as in, growing like a week, sharing weed—you get the picture.
Here’s how this works. You download any song they’ve got and you can play it all the way through, three times, for free. After that you can buy the song. You have to use their software to play the songs—their digital rights management prevents the song from playing otherwise.
Then anytime someone who gets the song from you buys it—you get paid.
As the track is passed along, people up the sharing chain continue to make money. For example, Bubba buys a Weed file and shares it with JoJo. JoJo buys the file and Bubba earns 20 percent. JoJo shares the file with Betty Lou. Betty Lou buys it and JoJo gets 20 percent and Bubba gets 10 percent. Betty Lou shares the file with Goober. Goober buys it and Betty Lou earns 20 percent, JoJo earns 10 percent, and the original sharer, Bubba, gets 5 percent. Yet for all transactions, the artist continues to earn 50 percent of the full purchase price.
Sound like multi-level marketing? That’s exactly what it is. The difference between this and so-called pyramid schemes is that potential buyers have three chances to sample the product and there’s no buy-in cost. The advantage it shares with other multi-level marketing schemes is that it provides monetary motivation for users to spread the material around. Best of all, the artist is fairly compensated.
You know what: why not? This could work.
The software is currently Wintel-only; a Mac version is expected in a few weeks.
