Buy Music, Make Money

We describe a digital music distribution system which fixes current problems in prevailing economic models for selling digital music. Our system aims to address the perverse incentives in the current digital music market, in which music buyers and music creators have incompatible goals and desired outcomes. The model gives users an added buying incentive: when a user buys a song, that user has a stake in how well that song does in the future. If a user buys a song, he or she is allocated a portion of the revenue from every future sale of that song. We present a proof-of-concept prototype of the system, to assess the viability of these ideas via simulated market conditions and via direct user interaction.