Showing posts with label shareware. Show all posts
Showing posts with label shareware. Show all posts

12 June 2008

Remember Shareware?

You know, that pretend free stuff that was around before truly free software became better known. Well, apparently, it's alive and living in China:


International Summit on Chinese Shareware (ISCS) 2008 organized by the Association of Chinese Shareware (CNSW) and Digital River will be held on 20th June in Shanghai. The organizer said that shareware has actually been in China for over 10 years, this event is to provide a stage where shareware authors, end users and international or local companies can share the knowledge of international market and Chinese market.

29 March 2007

Magnatune: A Classic Case of Disruption

When it comes to digital music, Magnatune is definitely on the side of the angels:

We call it "try before you buy." It's the shareware model applied to music. Listen to 525 complete MP3 albums from musicians we work with (not 30 second snippets).

We let the music sell itself, because we think that's the best way to get you excited by it.

We pick the best submissions from independent musicians so you don't have to.

If you like what you hear, download an album for as little as $5 (you pick the price), or buy a real CD, or license our music for commercial use. And no copy protection (DRM), ever.

Artists keep half of every purchase. And unlike most record labels, they keep all the rights to their music.

No major label connections.

We are not evil.

And how about this little factette:

In 1980, Classical music represented 20% of global music sales. In 2000, Classical had plummeted to just 2% of global music sales. What happened? Did all those people suddenly lose their taste for classical music? Or is something else going on?

At Magnatune.com, an online record label I run, we sell six different genres of music, ranging from Ambient to Classical to Death Metal and World Music. Yet Classical represents a whopping 42% of our sales. Even more intriguingly, only 9% of the visitors to our music site click on “classical” as the genre they’re interested in, yet almost half of them end up buying classical music.

Do read the rest - it's fascinating.

Looks like innovative digital music business models can be even more disruptive than you might think.

15 January 2006

One More Reason for Open Source

Among the many reasons for choosing open source software, one that is often overlooked is that it is much harder to hide things in code that can be inspected. There's bound to be some hacker somewhere with too much time on his/her hands who will take a look at the source code (and make sure that the source code compiles into the binary provided).

This makes adware/spyware far less of a problem for open source code than for your usual binary blob of freeware/shareware, which might contain anything. Anyone who is tempted to download some of the latter may care to peruse this report first. Then go and find some open source instead.