Excellent Article about Libraries and Music, you can read it here:
http://reviews.libraryjournal.com/2012/02/media/qa-with-sarah-houghton/
from the "amazingly informed and therefore properly opinionated" Librarian in Black. God, I love bad-ass, rock & roll librarians!
I was very pleased with the last paragraph:
What are some best-case-scenario solutions we in the field should be thinking about? You’ve mentioned Spotify and Rdio communitywide licenses. What about the Ann Arbor/Magnatune deal where the library pays the vendor a flat fee for unlimited patron access to over 900 albums I’d like to see libraries be able to purchase a certain number of streaming concurrent licenses so that users can log in to services like Spotify or Rdio with their library cards and access the premium offerings that way for free. [And it looks like Rdio is making moves in this direction.—Ed.] If the library hits its max, the user would be told what happened, and the library would be notified of turnaways on a weekly basis to evaluate whether to increase its concurrent licenses. We’d have to be careful about implementation, e.g., would users be encouraged to buy tracks, and, if so, how and is that OK with the library? I think that the Ann Arbor/Magnatune example is stellar, and I congratulate them on their work to create another model, one that recognizes the needs of both artists and consumers. |
Magnatune offers Libraries an extremely low cost flat fee approach to all our music (streaming and downloads), at just $0.10 per library cardholder, per year. More at: http://magnatune.com/info/libraries
I've blogged about this before:
http://blog.magnatune.com/2011/05/library-uses-magnatune-for-all-you-can-eat-music.html