A recent posting in iCommons:

Dinner with Magnatune’s John Buckman

Magnatune is an online record label, launched in 2004. With the motto ‘We are not evil’, Magnatune distributes music albums online under Creative Commons licence, and even allows people to listen to the full album before the purchase. Pricing ranges from $5 to $18 per album, and music buyers are encouraged to give away 3 music copies to anyone they know. The amount received from each track is split 50/50 with the musician. And two and half year later, Magnatune is going strong. But what are Magnatune’s challenges and how will it develop in the future?

In my quest to find out the answer to this question, I met with John Buckman, CEO and founder of Magnatune for dinner at a Zen-styled restaurant in the Akasaka area, in the heart of Tokyo. He was visiting Tokyo for the New Context conference organised by Digital Garage. He seemed to be excited in this huge, culturally mixed-up, and futuristic metropolis of the Far East, and even looked comfortable in a Yoga-like sitting position at the restaurant. The interview lasted more than 2 hours over Japanese-Korean fusion style dishes, which John and I fully enjoyed.

I have been very curious to find out more about Magnatune, and I suppose you may be interested too, so I wanted to share our conversation with the community.

icommons.org: More than 2 years have passed since you started Magnatune. Please tell us how it has been doing so far and where is it going from here?
John: It’s going fine. We now have more than 200 artists who have signed with us, and more than 500 albums distributed through our site. I work with three staffs members and we sell about 2 000 albums a month.

The business is just profitable. We are not making much money, but it covers all expenses for operations including the payment to staff. But the important things is that musicians are receiving money. My intention is for all musicians who have signed with Magnatune, to make at least $3 000 a year, which is the smallest amount an artists would need to produce another album. At the moment, a third of the signed musicians are making more than $3 000 a year, so the goal has not been accomplished yet. But we are getting closer.

I want to move slowly forward though. We, of course, would like to add more diversity to our album list. For example, we want reggae and hip hop musicians to work with us. But we would not push for this too quickly, because it would affect our ability to execute quality control and also diminish the benefits and commitment of already signed artists.

icommons.org: How do you find artists? Have you ever had difficulties in persuading artists to agree to distribute their music under Creative Commons licence?
John: We now have many music submissions from artists, though after negotiations and our assessment of the quality of the music, only about 10 out of 400 musicians finally agree to sign with us.

We aren’t involved in the process of music creation, but we care about the quality of music being distributed on Magnatune. Only those who agree to release their music under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licence, sign our recording contract. Some musician may feel uncomfortable with licencing their music as such, but we already have a few very successful cases through campaigns on Magnatune and ccMixter, and for example, low-format tracks being downloaded for free and eventually getting paid for use in films or other productions. These cases help to persuade musicians. Sometimes we find some musicians don’t go with us, because they don’t like the idea of distributing their music for free.

icommons.org: What does Creative Commons mean to Magnatune?
John: Creative Commons is helping us get noticed. People want to support Creative Commons, and bloggers feel good about Creative Commons. Bloggers want to blog about free things. Two thirds of visitors to Magnatune are new, usually they get information about us from blogs. We do not need much advertising. And it is a big deal that Creative Commons supports and helps podcasters. Record labels need radio stations to play its music. Podcasting serves as a ‘radio station’ for Magnatune.

icommons.org: Great. Well, let’s go to a more serious topic, then. What do you think of Creative Commons? What do you think it should be?
John: In my perspective, Creative Commons is not about non-commercial use, but about open culture. I am trying to make Magnatune a good example of how the commons does not exclude commercial use. There needs to be incentives for artists and great people to share, and to use Creative Commons. It seems that CC is now battling to find the balance between what is ‘commercial’ and non-commercial’. But from Larry Lessig‘ book, Free Culture, I reckon that the controversy of ‘commercial versus non-commercial’ use, is actually the battle of ‘permission culture versus open culture’. We need to figure out what barriers and conditions there are in reusing culture and then figure out how to fix it. I believe that the mission of Creative Commons is the promotion of reusable culture.

icommons.org: What is your definition of the ‘commons’?
John: I have a very different definition of the ‘commons’ actually. The ‘commons’ is a pool of culture, made available for you to reuse without needing to seek permission from the original creators, at a reasonable price. I think in this way, the ‘commons’ can become much larger.

icommons.org: Explain what you mean by ‘reasonable price’?
John: Sure. In my view, prices should be reasonable for use. For example, if you want to remix something, prices should be determined based on what you are doing with it. For example, if you are remixing something as homework, maybe $1 might be reasonable, but if you are using it for a film festival, $30 may be reasonable. That is the way I see it. I think it is all right to charge the price, as long as the price is not the barrier to reusing it.

icommons.org: Thank you very much, John. And I’m looking forward to talking to you again soon.
John: Thank you. I am trying to attend the next iSummit in Croatia. I’m looking forward to meeting Creative Commons people there.

Photograph: John Buckman, by Yonnie Kim, CC BY-ND 2.0

This entry was posted on Monday, October 16th, 2006 at 6:25 am and is filed under iCommons, Enterprise Commons, Open Community. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.