Giving money to open source

A year and a half ago, the excellent Linux music player Amarok added extensive support for Magnatune. The programmer, Nikolaj Hald Nielsen, did this on his own initiative, simply because he thought it'd be a neat thing for his favorite music player to have, and because he liked Magnatune's business philosophy.

I really like Amarok, so I volunteered that I'd be happy to donate 10% of gross sales at Magnatune caused by Amarok. I was also so pleased with the quality of Nikolaj's work, that I hired him, and he now spends 50% of his time on Magnatune, and I pay for him to spend the other 50% of his time on Amarok.

I'm *very* pleased to report that Amarok users buy a very healthy amount of Magnatune music. They can listen for free from inside Amarok, so that the streaming albums appear in Amarok as if they were local music, and they can easily buy the music in various open formats.

So far, Amarok has caused $11,557 in sales of Magnatune music!

This morning, I very happily sent a $1155.70 donation to Amarok.

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I also made the same offer to Rhythmbox, another great music player for Linux, and will be sending them a donation shortly as well. Their built-in support for Magnatune is *excellent*, and I've been personally using it myself to listen to our own Magnatune music.

Rhythmbox is installed by default on the ultra-popular, recently-released Ubuntu 8.04.

Mark Shuttleworth, the force behind Ubuntu, recently said this:

I am particularly glad that we are supporting Magnatune, which has articulated a really good future for the music industry," Shuttleworth said. "The problem with the music industry has not been the musicians; it has not been the music; and it has not been downloads. It has been the record companies. So to have a record company that says, 'Well, there is a better way to do this' feels like a good thing for us to support. So, that's groovy."

I've been talking to the programmer behind the magnatune support in Rhythmbox, and he plans to add a bunch of features to it over the summer. Cool!

Comments

[Nikolaj Hald Nielsen]

I am really excited to be working for John. Partly because I get to spend some of my time on a project, which previously was my hobby, but mostly because John really "gets it" about many tings such as free software and free culture which are close to my own heart.

Oh, and the shameless plug: The next major version of Amarok will take the Magnatune integration to a whole new level! :-)

[ssam]

thanks. i am looking forward to improvements in rhythmbox. also thanks for sorting out the ogg previews in rhythmbox.

ps: i dug the story http://digg.com/linux_unix/Magnatune_store_raises_money_for_amarok_and_rhythmbox

[Luis]

Wonderful! Just by reading this and Nicolaj's post about it I decided to try it out and it works like a charm. Keep up the good work (or like Neil Young would say: keep on rocking in the Free world)!

[stevel]

John, here's a Songbird add-on for interfacing to the Magnatune store via Songbird

http://addons.songbirdnest.com/extensions/detail/226

cheers,
steve (an enthusiastic Magnatune fan)