The Open Music Store is an open source software package that can be installed on any web server. Once installed, it lets the administrator upload music (mp3s), graphics, text, etc. and then presents to users a fully-functional online music store. Users can purchase music (or whatever data the artist is selling) and download it instantly. Credit card transactions are (optionally) handled by third-party services (like Google Checkout or Paypal). There is a plug-in framework for integrating with these services.

Note this is not an idea for a single website. Rather it is an idea for a software package that can be installed on any web server (like WordPress, Drupal, or phpBB).

The goal is to make it easy for artists to be in control of distributing their own content, instead of relying on centralized mega-distributors (like iTunes or Amazon who take a large cut of the purchase price).

This current state of affairs--the premise that large, centralized resources were needed to distribute music--is a legacy of the pre- Internet era.

By using the Open Music Store, all of the purchasing money goes directly to the artist.

Well, there are still a few costs but there's reason to believe these are trending toward minimal:

- Bandwidth and web hosting. This is definitely becoming cheap.

- Third-party credit card processing transaction fees. This burden, credit card fees, applies to all online transactions and eliminating it is outside the scope of this idea. The plug-in framework does allow these services to be swapped in and out, hopefully promoting more competition or alternatives to the credit-card-for- online-purchases model.
-- calculust, May 15 2009

these exist, this one provides a free space to upload and share. http://www.clearcha...2/signup/index.html
[dentworth, May 15 2009]

[dentworth] There are certainly websites that you can sell your music through. This idea is about a self-hosted solution, to minimize the middlemen that a sale passes through. As far as I'm aware, nothing like this exists (at least specializing in artists selling data, not "e-commerce" in general).
-- calculust, May 16 2009


Apologies. I was too flamboyant in my previous description and failed to communicate the idea. Did a massive rewrite of the description.

The key is that this is not an idea for one single website. Rather it is an idea for a software package that can be installed on any web server (like WordPress, Drupal, or phpBB).
-- calculust, May 16 2009



random, halfbakery