Magnatune is an American
independent record label
An independent record label (or indie label) is a record label that operates without the funding or distribution of major record labels; they are a type of small and medium-sized enterprise, small- to medium-sized enterprise, or SME. The labels ...
based in
Berkeley, California
Berkeley ( ) is a city on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay in northern Alameda County, California, United States. It is named after the 18th-century Anglo-Irish bishop and philosopher George Berkeley. It borders the cities of Oakland, Cali ...
, founded in spring 2003.
It only sold music for download through its website but added a print-CD-on-demand service in late 2004 and in September 2007 began selling complete albums and individual tracks through
Amazon.com
Amazon.com, Inc., doing business as Amazon, is an American multinational technology company engaged in e-commerce, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence. Founded in 1994 by Jeff Bezos in Bellevu ...
. In May 2008, Magnatune launched all-you-can-eat membership plans. From March 2010 Magnatune dropped the CD printing service and moved exclusively to all-you-can-eat membership plans.
Magnatune was the first record label to license music online and as of May 2015 had sold over 7,000 licenses in its twelve years of existence.
In 2024, Magnatune announced that it was no longer offering new subscriptions or licenses, or trading of any kind. However, some music would still be available for free, via its site to listen to.
Overview
Magnatune makes non-exclusive agreements with artists and gives them 50% of any proceeds from online sales or licensing. These kinds of policies were very unusual for a record label in 2003–2004. Users can
stream
A stream is a continuous body of water, body of surface water Current (stream), flowing within the stream bed, bed and bank (geography), banks of a channel (geography), channel. Depending on its location or certain characteristics, a strea ...
or download music in
MP3
MP3 (formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany under the lead of Karlheinz Brandenburg. It was designed to greatly reduce the amount ...
format (no
DRM
DRM may refer to:
Government, military and politics
* Defense reform movement, U.S. campaign inspired by Col. John Boyd
* Democratic Republic of Madagascar, a former socialist state (1975–1992) on Madagascar
* Direction du renseignement militair ...
) without charge before choosing whether to buy or not. (Some MP3s available for free download have Magnatune advertisements in them.) Buyers used to be able to purchase individual albums and choose their own price, from US$5 to $18 per album, but in March 2010 Magnatune moved to a subscriptions-only business model, where buyers have to purchase a monthly subscription (with a three-month minimum) under which they can download as much music as they like from Magnatune.
Customers may download music they have purchased in
WAV
Waveform Audio File Format (WAVE, or WAV due to its filename extension; pronounced or ) is an audio file format standard for storing an audio bitstream on personal computers. The format was developed and published for the first time in 1991 ...
,
FLAC
FLAC (; Free Lossless Audio Codec) is an audio coding format for lossless compression of digital audio, developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation, and is also the name of the free software project producing the FLAC tools, the reference software ...
, MP3,
Ogg Vorbis
Vorbis is a free and open-source software project headed by the Xiph.Org Foundation. The project produces an audio coding format and software reference encoder/decoder (codec) for lossy audio compression, libvorbis. Vorbis is most common ...
and
AAC
AAC may refer to:
Aviation
* Advanced Aircraft, a company from Carlsbad, California
* Airborne aircraft carrier, a type of aircraft
* Alaskan Air Command, a radar network
* American Aeronautical Corporation, a company from Port Washington, New ...
encoding formats. Music files sold by Magnatune do not use any form of
digital rights management
Digital rights management (DRM) is the management of legal access to digital content. Various tools or technological protection measures, such as access control technologies, can restrict the use of proprietary hardware and copyrighted works. DRM ...
to prevent customers from making copies of music files they have purchased; Magnatune encourages buyers to share up to three copies with friends.
All of the tracks downloaded free of charge are licensed under the
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License. Even though using liberal licensing is not a new idea in itself, Magnatune is one of the first companies to try to build a business in music around this idea.
Founder
John Buckman is founder of Magnatune. In 1994, Buckman and his ex-wife
Jan Hanford founded
Lyris Technologies. Buckman was CEO and primary programmer of Lyris' product line: Lyris ListServer, MailShield, and MailEngine. He sold the company in June 2005. In August 2006, he launched the
for-profit corporation
A for-profit corporation is an organization which aims to earn profit through its operations and is concerned with its own interests, rather than the interests of the public (nonprofit corporation).
Structure
A for-profit corporation is usually an ...
BookMooch
BookMooch is an international online book exchange community founded by John Buckman in 2006. By 2008, membership reached around 74,000 users in over 90 countries and about 2,000 books are swapped per day.
Site description
BookMooch allows ...
, an online community for the exchange of used books, which—in combination with his work with Magnatune—has associated Buckman with the
Free Culture movement
The free-culture movement is a social movement that promotes the freedom to distribute and modify the creative works of others in the form of free content, otherwise known as open content. They encourage creators to create such content by using p ...
. In September 2007, he was elected to the Board of Directors of the
Electronic Frontier Foundation
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is an American international non-profit digital rights group based in San Francisco, California. It was founded in 1990 to promote Internet civil liberties.
It provides funds for legal defense in court, ...
and in February 2010 was appointed chairman of the board. In April 2015 Buckman launched