Latest plan to save the music industry

Among the various scams and plans to save the music industry, or at least salvage enough from it so that we get music to listen to, and musicians get to eat, is this one – that has the bonus of building charitable donations into its system.

Indmill (not hard to guess what kind of music it’s pushing) is the brainchild of Nick Sommerlad and Alex Morris. Morris, who is part of the British nu-folk band Candidate, was sick of seeing how little revenue flowed back to the band from selling physical CDs, and tried to work out how little you could get away with selling music for over the internet and still keep the same minimal profit. The answer is: staggeringly little.

Albums sell on indmill for £1.25, and EPs for 45p, of which the website takes a 10% cut – 5% of which they donate to charity. The other 90% goes to the artist, and they are encouraged to donate a similar slice to charity themselves. The ethos being, that ‘lots of little amounts add up’.

The result, for customers, is that they can fill up their iPods for peanuts. For example, you can pick up all five Candidate albums (including Nuada, their spookily brilliant tribute to The Wicker Man) for £6.25, which is less than you can get any single one of them from Amazon or iTunes.

So what music can you find on there? Well, it’s early days, but it seems as if folk and low-key electronica prevail. I particularly like the trad folk stylings of The Rowan Amber Mill, and the Lemonjelly-ish ‘bubblegum electronica’ of Grampian Horn, Morris again, whose animation for his track ‘Lost in Longmeads’ (play it above) is a corker.

Could it save the world? Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, but it’s good that someone’s going about it the right way.

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• davdos

  Now, if they can establish a low cost or free advertising base then they are made. Without it they fail

• http://www.facebook.com/people/Mike-Hewlett/1009274966 Mike Hewlett

  I think Prince may yet be right. He has refused to allow his music to be sold digitally. You have to buy the CD/vinyl etc.

  Therefore ANY Prince music available over the internet must be pirate and can be closed down, the uploader/provider hunted down and criminalised.