I was going to leave a comment at Lucas Gonze’s weblog, but I may as well use
trackback and hope he sees this. Lucas
posted a follow-up to his “whine that policing unauthorized music on Webjay is
turning into a huge drag”. He is considering a form of community moderation (suggested by
Seb Paquet). I thought “Jim” left an
interesting comment in response to this. The last thing he said was:
“Of course, with webjay, there is a more black-and-white issue. Is the
material obviously illegal or not?”
This touches on what I wrote
the other day about not being able to link to Lucid 3 and other New Zealand music
using WebJay. Following on from Jim’s query, I’m wondering how much of popular music
is available free online? For example, if I wanted to create a playlist of my
favorite songs in the Billboard Top 100 this week, how many of those songs would be
available to me as free links? Anyone know an estimate?
How about more ‘niche’ music – like for example New Zealand music? It would be really
interesting to find out what is the ratio of free linkable songs (which I hereby
christen with the acronym FLS) to songs you have to pay to listen to, for each
genre of music. Does bluegrass for example have a higher FLS ratio than blues? The
higher the FLS (Free Linkable Songs) ratio, the better.
