[more about our penguins]

PenguinSong.net is [will be -- we're just getting started!] a web-based cooperative for musicians and listeners, based on the following principles:

• We're all in this together.
  It's a coop: everyone pays the same amount to belong. At the end of the month the take gets totalled and the bills (i.e. copyright license fees, ISP charges, etc.) get paid. If there's anything left over, musicians get a bonus, and listeners get a rebate.
• Musicians should get paid for their work.
  There's a standard royalty out there for songwriters and their publishers. We also believe that the performers should get something. But we're all in this together: any member can post a song, including a cover of a song already in the system, and get paid for every download.
• Fair's fair -- we believe in fair prices and fair use.
  There is such a thing as fair use. Once you've downloaded a song, that copy is yours. Copy it to your MP3 player, burn it onto a CD, give the CD to your friend and burn another. (Don't go abusing the privilege, though: if you burn a thousand CD's and sell them we expect to see some royalties coming back.) There's also the idea of a fair price. Everybody in the music world knows how much a songwriter gets paid for each copy. That's what we want to pay, and since this is a coop there's no reason we should charge you any more.
• Every song deserves a good home (page).
  Every song uploaded into the system has its own unique ``home page''. It includes not only the credits but the lyrics, pointers to all known versions, fan discussions, even a chat room that includes everyone listening to that song right now (unless they don't want to chat, which brings us to the final item).
• Big Brother is not watching.
  We're not going to keep track of what you download -- only how much. We're not going to peer over your shoulder and count how many times you listen to a song after you download it, or check who you give it to -- but you'll be better off sending them a URL instead. There will be no ``digital rights management.'' Moreover, your personal information is yours, and we won't go passing it around or selling your name to spammers. There will be mailing lists, both moderated and unmoderated, but they'll all be for members only.

This is not a filesharing scheme like Gnutella or Freenet: every song is uploaded by the rights-holders, who get paid every time that song is downloaded. On the other hand we're not a recording company or a publishing company, either: we're a coop, and we're in it to make money for our members, not a bunch of shareholders (another way of looking at it is that the members are the shareholders, with one share each).

On the other hand there will (probably, eventually) be a network of music servers that works a lot like a peer-to-peer network, but feels a lot different -- see this writeup.

Here's how it works [will work] in detail:

• Registration is free [or maybe not required at all]. It gets you access to all public pages, and a limited number of free downloads per month of a very limited set of songs (members get to chose which of the songs they put up are downloadable by nonmembers). You don't get the ability to post comments or music, and you don't get a member page. You do, of course, get the ability to buy stuff: CD's, logowear, software, whatever PenguinSong or its members are selling.
• Membership is [will probably be] a fairly low one-time fee for lifetime membership, and comes with a reasonable amount of free music and access to all the songs. We'll bill you if you go over. With membership comes the ability to post comments and reviews, join chats, post music, create a home page, and sell your stuff. We'll charge you a commission (which goes towards paying musicians and, after that, bonuses and rebates), but it'll be less than a distributor and retailer would squeeze out. If you've posted music, you'll get paid for every download -- but you'll have to agree to accept what we can pay if we fall short. We'll try to make sure that doesn't happen too often, but it may take us a while in the beginning to get our rates adjusted properly.
• Ordinary membership just requires a one-time payment, and basically gets you a share in the co-op. All members have an equal voice in the co-op's operation, including electing the people who make the day-to-day operating decisions and, of course, setting the membership and subscription fees. Once you're a member, you're in for good.
• Subscribers are simply members who pay a monthly fee for either an unlimited or a merely large number of downloads per month -- basically it's the difference between what we have to pay in licensing fees and what we take in from other sources. Whether it's unlimited or just capped, or whether there are multiple levels, will be up to the members to decide. Bear in mind that the total mechanical license fees for music currently come to somewhere in the neighborhood of $.20.
• In order to post music, all the necessary rights to it (lyrics, music, and performance copyrights) have to be owned by members, or appropriate permission obtained by members. (Unless a law is passed to set a compulsory license fee for individual downloads and we're pulling in enough revenue to at least pay the fee, in which case we might change our policy.) In other words, you can post a performance provided some other member wrote it and created a song page for it. [We need to have some lawyers check into the details; it's possible that a member's cover of someone else's song would come under the normal compulsory mechanical licensing.]
• ``Posting'' a song (actually, any piece of music from a song to a symphony) means putting up a ``song page'' (the song's ``home page'') for it, typically with the lyrics (if any) and either a sound file or a lead sheet. The song page automagically gets a download counter, a comment area, a chat ``room'', download links for all posted performances, pointers to other versions (see the next item) and to copies on other sites, and a link to the store for buying any available recordings.
• Unless you specifically forbid it (and why would you want to?), posting a song gives other members permission to post ``versions'' (called ``filks'' in some circles) including altered lyrics, parodies, totally different words ``to the tune of'' your song, and so on. You still get paid -- royalties are divided fairly among all significant contributors to a derived work -- and of course you get proper credit -- there's room on a song page to list all contributions, no matter how small. Notice that you don't have to be a subscriber, just a member, in order to get paid for your work (unlike, for example, mp3.com where you pay a monthly fee in order to get anything at all back). We'll happily apply your license fees to your subscription, if you want one, but if you don't listen to a lot of other peoples' stuff you don't need one.

• Oh, yes: ghost pages. If there's a song you like by someone other than a co-op member, make a ghost page for it. Point it at the song's real home page, if there is one, or at the performer or songwriter's page if they have one. Don't post the music or lyrics -- that would be wrong. But other than that it looks just like a song page. If the songwriter ever joins the coop, it becomes the song page.
• You can also use ghost pages if you're a singer-songwriter (for example) and you have an album with a cover or two on it. Go ahead and make song pages for everything of yours, and ghost pages for the covers.

The whole idea is to build a community around the music. In some sense it's all one gigantic jam session, just like the Web is one gigantic HTML document. The difference is that attribution is very carefully tracked, so that everyone who deserves credit gets it: nobody's going to get rich here, but there's no reason why you can't become famous -- or at least infamous.

Initially we'll be aiming at the folk and filk music communities (filk is the indigenous folk music of science-fiction fandom). Both are characterized by a large proportion of amateur and part-time musicians, a large amount of audience participation, and a tradition of song-swapping, melody re-use, variant lyrics, and parody. We'll expand out of those areas as more people join; ultimately it's whatever our members want.

There's another way to look at subscriptions that might be useful: the subscription price is probably not going to be much different from the price of a web-hosting service (i.e. the price you'd pay to someplace like GeoCities for a home page with no popup ads). So you could regard PenguinSong as a musician's cooperative subsidized by a web-hosting service that just happens to offer lots of free music (and the ability to link to it on your web pages) as a perk. Can't beat that, can you?

For reference purposes, here is the essay I originally wrote describing this proposal: theStarport.com/people/steve/Doc/Music/coop.html

And here's the Project Roadmap (which includes a tentative near-term schedule).

Here are the Technical Details (currently sketchy-to-nonexistant).

Here is a little on Why I'm doing this