Horrible music promoted by the majors is not an excuse for horrible music promoted by Mperia. By setting such a low standard of fare and relatively high prices for the poor goods on offer, Mperia – with its prominent Bitpass support – is disrupting and discouraging the independent music commercial space and only encouraging people to continue to seek their music within mainstream channels.

Joshua you have to do better. Or you will disappear. You are serving neither artists nor fans but drowning all in ever falling standards.

An example of a well curated alternative music space. Look and learn. More thoughts on online music, curated music and mini record labels.

Better editorial is not the point. The point is to allow anybody who wants to sell music online the ability to do so. The artists on Mperia price their own work, not the site, and we recommend a price point of about 50 cents per track.

And the costs? A tricky question. Are you talking about the actual cost of producing music? The cost of hosting it? Or the intangible value of that music as determined by the person who created it, or the person who downloads it?

If so, we’d better have a pretty major fire sale on 95% of the absolutely horrible shit the major record labels market as “music,” though it’s not music as I understand the term. Most of that is worth less than the stuff on Mperia, which is at least the product of somebody’s good intentions to make good work.

Shirky’s notion about micropayments and anxiety is just stupid. Do you feel anxiety about buying a candy bar if it means you have to break a dollar? You want a candy bar, you buy a candy bar. You want a song — or a stock photo or an edition of a web comic or what have you — you buy it. If the fifty cents or whatever it is proves to be a major sticking point for the buyer, I would humbly suggest that to be the buyer’s problem, not the system’s.