Mindawn Also Selected As University Partner

Adding to yesterday's story about Cdigix, it appears that the University of California has also selected Mindawn as a partner to provide music and video to its 200,000 students. Created by Shawn Gordon and launched in September of 2004, Mindawn runs on Mac OS X, Windows and Linux and offers DRM-free music purchases in completely open, patent free compression formats with two-tiered pricing which makes a lot of sense (i.e., $.99 cents for Ogg compared to $1.24 for the same file in FLAC format. Most albums are priced at $6.99 for Ogg, or $8.99 for FLAC.) The use of an open format like FLAC enables users to do what they want with their music once they download it, without paying a penalty in sound quality. (Most people can't tell FLAC apart from the quality of a direct CD rip in WAV format.) With Mindawn's service, students can purchase full albums or single songs from the company's catalog, and enjoy complete freedom with what they can do with the songs purchased, which might be more appealing to college student's mentality...

Mindawn is not the first online independent music download service to offer multi-platform support and music without DRM. But it's one of the few to support an open-source encoding scheme which reduces the size of audio files to about 50 percent of their CD size without reducing the quality of the audio. Mindawn also features full song previews instead of short clips and directly supports Linux users, something no other service has done...

Royalties are paid to artists using two models. One gives Mindawn "exclusive" distribution rights, yielding the artists 75% of every sale. And the other offers non-exclusive content, which pays the artist 55%...In both cases, artists get paid via Paypal automatically, every month. Record labels are also encouraged to secure distribution deals to their artists through Mindawn.com. There's no approval process. Artists simply pay a $50 registration fee and can have their music ready for purchase as soon as they upload it. Mindawn specializes in progressive rock, or prog-rock. Other labels that have signed up include DVS Records, UBP International, OtterSong Records, Lion Music, Record Heaven, Big Balloon Music, Fading Ways Music and more...