Magnatune

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**Magnatune**

Opened:	Spring 2003
Pricing:	USA: $5–$18 per album
Platforms:	Platform independent
Format:	MPEG Layer 3 (.mp3), Advanced Audio Coding (.aac), OGG Vorbis (.ogg), FLAC (.flac), WAV (.wav)
Restrictions:	None, Creative Commons License
Catalogue:	240 artists, 530 albums
Preview:	Entire song
Streaming:	Preview only
Protocol:	Hypertext Transfer Protocol (http://)
Availability:	Worldwide
Website:	www.magnatune.com

Magnatune is a small Berkeley, California–based independent record label, founded in spring 2003 by John Buckman, then-CEO of e-mail software company Lyris. It aims at treating both its musicians and its customers fairly—its tagline is "We are not evil." It originally only sold music for download through its website, but added a print-CDs-on-demand service in late 2004. Magnatune was the first record label to license music online and as of March 2007 averaged 70 music licenses per month.

Magnatune makes non-exclusive agreements with artists, and gives them fifty percent of any proceeds from online sales or licensing.^[1] These kind of policies are very unusual for a record label in 2003–2004. Users can stream and download music in MP3 format without charge before making a decision whether to buy or not. Buyers choose their own price, from US $5 to $18 per album, and may download music they have purchased in WAV, FLAC, MP3, OGG Vorbis and AAC encoding formats. Music files sold by Magnatune do not use any form of Digital Rights Management to prevent customers from making copies of music files they have purchased; and actually encourage buyers to share up to three copies with friends^[2]

John Buckman

All freely-available music is licensed under the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license from the Creative Commons. Even though using liberal licensing is not a new idea in itself, Magnatune is one of the first and most visible companies to try to build a business in music around this idea. It is not yet clear whether this model can produce enough profit for Magnatune to run a healthy business. As of early June 2006, Magnatune has signed 222 artists and has 500 albums in its catalog.

As of version 1.4.4 the music player Amarok has built-in support for Magnatune, allowing people to preview and buy music from all artists signed to the label from within the application. Rhythmbox 0.9.7 added this functionality in December 2006.