On the album download pages Coda.fm has a short bio of the artist, the album’s track list, recommended albums, but also a link to buy the album on Amazon. Contrary to the “pirates of the Amazon” firefox plugin we covered previously, users are encouraged to buy the music instead of downloading it – not the other way around.

“We give the user the option to easily buy an album that they liked after downloading and hearing it for free,” the Coda.fm founder told TorrentFreak. He thought it was a good idea, and it therefore came as a surprise when Amazon asked him to remove the links from the site. In addition, the world’s largest online retailer closed his associate account.

“I can’t overstate enough the idiocy of said request: they’re actually telling us to stop helping them selling albums,” the Coda.fm said venting his frustration. Indeed, in theory this is a win-win situation for all parties involved. Amazon, the artists, labels and the Coda founder all made extra money while the users of the site could buy off their guilt.

So why did Amazon request the links to be removed then? Most likely they don’t want to be affiliated with a BitTorrent site because that might hurt their image. The Amazon links are still on Coda.fm though, and the founder of the site has no intention of removing them anytime soon.

“Although we’re no longer an Amazon Associate, we’re going to keep the links to buy the albums. A couple of hundred albums and digital downloads have been sold to date, proving it’s usefulness, and that is the only criteria we use to decide what features we keep or remove,” TorrentFreak was told.

The fact that already hundreds of albums were sold through Coda.fm shows that ‘pirates’ are willing to pay for music. It’s time for the music industry to find out how to get them on board.

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

The navigation of the site can be compared to some of the better e-commerce sites, with listings of popular and new artists and albums, and the option to browse through different genres. On top of that, the site has a full-blown recommendation engine that makes it a great tool to discover new music, especially when combined with the album reviews and artist bios.

The site is open to everyone, and users are not required to sign up. However, those who take a few seconds to create an account can post comments, and track the status of any torrents they upload. To make sure that the site remains free from spam, every uploaded torrent has to be approved by one of the moderators.

“I’m a music lover,” the Coda.fm founder told TorrentFreak. “I always use BitTorrent to get my fix, but I was disappointed with all the public indexers and private trackers.”

“I found the experience of searching for music on public trackers very tiresome, always having to navigate through a lot of irrelevant search results and dead torrents, and was tired too of the strict rules of most of the private trackers and the elitism of some of their communities,” he added.

This encouraged the founder to build Coda.fm, which he released to the public only a few days ago. The only downside is that the site will be a major target for the RIAA and IFPI, especially because all the torrents are manually approved before they are added to the site. The “we are a search engine just like Google” argument doesn’t quite hold up here.

That aside, Coda.fm is truly an amazing site, and it is quite refreshing to see a new indexer that thinks outside the box. What do you think?

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