riskybusiness04  

I loved how this interview started. "How can you save music thats gonna die?"

With those words began my interview with John Buckman, who is the founder and CEO of Magnatune.com, a website that offers music, licensed directly from the site. All of these artists have made a deal with Magnatunes that allows the site to offer the music for sale, and the artists get half. Ask alot of independents who are members of BMI/Ascap about their royalties, bet you get a blank look.

As John pointed out, the days of going into a record store, and buying a CD are pretty much over. The future is now in terms of buying music online, but at the same time "not everyone is jumping on the fair use bandwagon just yet". The majors want to try and control this medium, but haven't figured out how and probably never will, given the vastness of the internet. One thing about John that I didn't find out until right before the show was that he is also on the board of the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) which is a watchdog group that watches out for the rights for the rest of us online. I wish I had known this beforehand, guess this will teach me to do more research (outside of the press release) on my guests, I would have had more questions about that aspect of what he does, thank goodness Deb was in chat (couldn't make it on the show, her voice was SHOT) and was able to feed me questions.

We really learned some neat stuff on this interview, I encourage you to check it out! The show ran 2 hours, but the interview itself only ran an hour (first hour of the show) so check it out in the player or you can go directly to the show page (click here) and give it a listen. Also, be sure to check out magnatune.com you won't regret it!