This is something as rare as a non-technical blog post from me, but I though this was worth posting!
yesterday Magnatune and Amarok decided that it was time Amarok received its first payout of the money earned as commission by selling Magnatune albums through Amarok. This came out to
$1155.70 which is 10% of the
$11,557 (!!) in sales that Amarok has generated so far. That is actually really good I think! This money will be used to cover hosting and conference costs of the Amarok project and thus will help further improve Amarok.
Besides giving Amarok a 10% commission, Magnatune also employs me, and allow me to spend about half my time Hacking on Amarok, so they truly are a very big supporters of Amarok, and we are delighted to be working with someone who really "gets" free software and free culture.
With the greatly improved Magnatune integration in the upcomming Amarok 2, and the eventual release of Amarok 2 on Windows and Mac, it will be really interesting to see how far we can take this in the future. For now, I hope that the Amarok users will continue to buy music through Amarok, as it is a great way of supporting Amarok development, at the same time as supporting independent artists, who get a full 50% of the purchase price.
John Buckman ( the founder of Magnatune) blogged about this
here
