[egbert]

I created something like that: http://musiclove.rs

You hook up your last.fm profile and each week you get to divide an x amount of money between the artists you listened to. I've been using it myself for about a year now.

The only catch is that you need to find the email addresses of artists you want to pay to yourself, so they can be paid with PayPal.

This 'catch' allowed me to use it as single user for a year though so its very usable for me in this stage. Feel free to try it! Let me know what you think!

[noonespecial]

And this is why I love HN. I just came to the conclusion that I really should think about doing something like this and pondering if there was a way I could automate it as I wrote my comment(1). And here it is. Awesome.

(1) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6044279

[egbert]

Thanks! Would be great if you'd try the app for a while. Let me know what you think!

[morphyn]

Awesome! A gittip.com for music. This "only catch" seems like a big one though. I guess it will get better when/if the user base grows significantly.

[egbert]

Thanks!

I know. But I couldn't think of another way to start small.

If usage grows hopefully artists will actively promote their desired 'fund receiving' email address.

The next step would of course be that artists can signup and the whole email address finding step would be dropped

[morphyn]

Did you take a look at the way gittip does this ? You basically donate to a twitter handle and its owner can 'claim' the account whenever they want. No money is actually transferred until the account is claimed. I don't know if it can be applied to artists/bands though.

I was also wondering: is there no transfer fees with paypal ? Don't they make small amounts transfer useless ?

And one last thing: is it not weird for bands/artists to suddenly receive money from people without being informed about the site and all that ?

[egbert]

Good points!

'the way gittip does this': I naively assumed Gittip was sitting on the money until it was claimed, but charging the moment its claimed is probably better. I'll have to look into it!

'transfer fees with paypal': Yes and yes. I'm currently spending about 8-10 dollars a week divided over 5 artists. So the slice Paypal gets is significant but bearable. This of course isn't ideal and I've been thinking about other ways of doing this. Bitcoin maybe?

'receive money (...) without being informed': I've got this covered! When an artist receives money they also receive an email explaining why they receive it and how many times the listener played their songs.

[nooron]

Hey!

I think you have a phenomenal idea.

I worked in the bitcoin space for a while (cofounded an exchange), and this was a proposal that often came up. so awesome to see someone actually building it. Could I convince you to send me an email: Jordanbirn at gmail.com ?

[uniclaude]

That hurts somewhere to say this, but I've been thinking about this subject, and that's better that the idea I had. I'm going to use this, and this will get me back on Last.fm, which I kind of abandoned.

That gittip suggestion down there is also great. I'm in touch with a bunch of artists who would totally love that.

Please keep building this.

[GotAnyMegadeth]

This is brilliant. I've been thinking about making this for a while. If I add a band's email address, would that then be available to other people who listen to the same artist? How would you stop wrongly donating to artists with the same name?

[egbert]

Thanks!

Artists' email addresses aren't shared right now (bc then it would be easy to pollute with wrong addresses). So this also answers your second question (Unless someone listens to two bands with the same name). It remembers for your own account though, so you don't have to fill out the same address twice.

[Socketubs]

Just subscribe!

[egbert]

Nice! Let me know what you think!