Get Paid for File Sharing

I heard about the Weed filesharing system a while ago but didn't move to post about it. Now that everyone is talking about it, I'll amplify what I think is a great idea on the web.

Basically, the guys who created Weed understand that filesharing fans are valuable to artists and deserve to be rewarded for their promotion, not punished. So with their system, any fan who shares a Weed file (which is playable in any Windows media device) gets a 20% cut  of the money from anyone paying for the file. The artist gets 50%, and the rest is split between Weed and whoever else shared the file along the way. To protect the artist and encourage sales, the file can only be played 3 times by one user before it prompts you to buy.

It sounds good, but feels complicated. I expect only indie artists to really hop on this. Chuck D has his music on there, but he seems to love giving away music nowadays just to prove a point.

(Wouldn't it be great if all those mp3 blogs out there adopted this system? Hmmm....)

Anyway, I hope the format succeeds. Weed could be the new MP3.com.

Comments

[Lilian Philips]

Hi Hashim,

Great you like it :) and thanx for mentioning it too!

Next to Chuck D there are already a few more major artists there and I'm sure that it's only a matter of, little, time before more will discover the wonderful possibilities of Weed indeed!

Others:
Sir Mix-A-Lot
Heart
Kirstin Hersch (& 50 Foot Wave her new band)
Sananda Maitreya
Peter Tosh

It's really simple actually:
you can freely download any song you like, listen to it 3 times and if you like it, just install the Weed program (once) which enables you to pay for the song(s).
That's all!
And if you share the purchased songs on p2p or any other way (on and offline) and someone downloads it from you and buys it, you earned your money. All automatically too! Easy does it really :)

Musical greetings,
Lilian

[thatcoloredfella]

http://www.debbieschlussel.com/columns/112404p.htm

[Nigel Clarke]

WEED is cool. Keep an eye out for OGG. MP3s take up way to much space.

[Brian]

I have created something similar to WEED called PeerIt ( http://www.peerit.com ). PeerIt.com allows users to sell their torrents and accept PayPal and/or Google Checkout as payment methods. Buyers get paid via PayPal for sharing their torrents.

[3 time grammy winner]

All I know is if want reall succe$$, read the 50 page book www.secretgarden.com
it work for me!! just that simple

[sunil]

I think ziddu is much better than this. It also pays u for the downloads.