The big advantage NiN and Radiohead have, of course, is that they already have a huge fanbase. From a standing start it would be difficult for relatively unknown bands to give their music away, and it would be much harder to get people to donate. To see if this would indeed be the case, and to get an impression of how much revenue an artist can generate from the donation model, we decided to crunch the numbers from Jamendo.

Jamendo is one of the largest music sharing sites where users have the option to donate to artists they would like to support. Since the site launched in June 2005, close to half a million users have signed up. In three years, the site has turned into one of the largest music sharing communities. However, it seems like the donate buttons are gathering dust.

Before we go into detail, we want to make it clear that Jamendo is one of the best free music services on the Internet, as it brings together artists and fans. This post is not an attempt to write about how Jamendo failed, because the site is much more than a ‘download and donate’ platform. What we want to show, however, is that donation based music models are not money magnets for the average artist.

We decided to examine the total number of donations up until October 25, 2008, and the results are quite revealing. Of the 423968 users, 1650 have donated something, little under 0.5%. In total, these users were good for 2712 donations adding up to just over $36,000. This translates into an average of little over $10 per donation. The largest donation on Jamendo thus far was 200 Euros ($250), impressive, but not as impressive as the $5000 NiN’s Trent Reznor donated when he downloaded his ‘free copy’ of Radiohead’s album.

The top grossing artist on Jamendo is Rob Costlow, with just over $1000 in donations over three years. On Jamendo, his two albums were downloaded more than 50,000 times, and over half a million people have streamed his music on the site. Jamendo currently has close to 10,000 artists (not all of them accept donations), and 648 of those received at least one donation. To some this all sounds quite disappointing, but does this mean that artists shouldn’t use donation based services such as Jamendo?

The answer to this question is simple. If their goal is to make thousands of dollars from it, probably not. However, that is not what most artists intend to do. They want their music to be heard, create an audience and pick up some fans here and there. The people who download their music for free, and like it, are potentially the people who visit their gigs, buy merchandising, and tell their friends about this great band they discovered. Lesser known artists will never be able to generate a decent income from donations, but making their music available for free sure is part of a viable business model.

Update: In the title of the article we used “NiN’s Donation Model”, this is not completely accurate. Radiohead had more of a donation model than NiN.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Some are displaying the amount of donations they have received and these seem sizable in some cases. Although there is no doubt that some generous supporters have already given to these funds, its likely the amounts of donations shown have been inflated to imply that this is the correct fund to donate to.

Fact: NONE of these sites are sanctioned or set up in collaboration with OiNK, so please, please, please – don’t give them your money! This has been confirmed by TorrentFreak directly with OiNK himself.

This means ALL sites claiming to try to raise funds for OiNK should be considered dubious. It’s entirely possible that some good natured individuals are trying to genuinely raise money but it’s impossible to separate the scammers from the tiny minority of honest people.

There may not even be a fund in the end, this hasn’t been decided yet so in the meantime, please keep your money safe.

Potential donors are advised to wait until we make an announcement about the correct fund to donate to. We will do that here on TorrentFreak.

Stay tuned.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.