Thanks to Ken Edwards (see b-roll) for pointing this one out. An interesting twist: musicrebellion.com offers music download pricing based on the popularity of a track.

Upon checking out their 5 cent (!) “real steals” page, I was intrigued how they could regularly offer tracks at prices that start (30 cents) at half the next closest legal music download service (Rhapsody offers 79 cent downloads). Here’s what I discovered:

- tracks are in wma or mp3 (not both, one or the other usually, it seems)
- tracks are 128k so the quality is comparable to buymusic.com (not that good, IMO)
- the digital rights for the test track I purchased are shown below. The rights do vary
- the selection is somewhat interesting offering some stuff from bands that you can’t find elsewhere like Metallica (full albums only at the time of this writing), but lacking some other bands.

- there are multiple ways to pay for tracks. You can add to your musicrebellion account using PayPal in $5 increments or use the new peppercoin system which allows you to make many micropayments and then groups the payments into a more significant figure and charges your credit card. This way you — and them — can avoid paying transaction fees for micropurchases like under $1. I noticed that actually using the peppercoin system was not exactly as easy as one click. On the musicrebellion peppercoin page they show a flow chart of how the peppercoin purchase process works. Once you register for peppercoin, download the necessary pepperpanel then you can begin the process to unlock the music from musicrebellion purchased this way.

The concept is that the price of the tracks is driven by demand. Meaning that the more people who buy the tracks, the higher the price will be. The less purchases, the price will go down. This service is still very much in its infancy but it’s certainly worth a closer inspection. Grade: B

Did this post make you go hmm?

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