Tipster (a little crossposting)

In a mystical land called Hack The Planet

Aaron Swartz said:

It seems there have been little developments in voluntary payments. I think it would be nice to have such a thing to combine with the exciting P2P work that’s going on, as well as combat some entertainment-industry FUD.

To which I replied:

Hell, yes. In this time of the media co. running around screaming “they’re stealing, they’re stealing” we don’t yet have a way to show them that we aren’t stealing, they just don’t know how to run a business in a modern era. Tipster is what’s needed. For one, the name is great, a few people could figure out what it is right away. What’s needed is the “PGP” or “Deep Crack” approach. We know it can be done in theory, but no one that I’ve seen has gotten theory in code. Without that working example the world will just ignore us. The main app is a media player, possibly just focusing on music Version 1.0

• MusicBrainz (for the metadata)
• MuiscLink (aka FairTunes) like service

The main idea is to track what the user has listened to and every month prompt the user to pay $20 in which x% goes to the artist they listened to x% of the month, etc. Version 2.0

• MusicBrainz
• Artist pages that are Tipster aware
• OpenDBS or other low overhead payment system

Cut that middle man out of the picture. MP3/ogg files tell us where to send the $$$. You could do quite a few things to make this app more attractive than winamp/kazaa:

• Allow creation of peer recomendation groups
• integration with a p2p network
• CD cover art
• Self organizing library using MusicBrainz metadata
• Bitzi file rating system
• use mp3guessenc to weed out and replace Xing encoded mp3’s

I’m hoping to move in this direction myself.