After more than three years, we have decided to shut down the Popcuts music store. Let us tell you why:

We set out with a grand vision: Repair the broken economics of the music industry. 

At the beginning stood the realization that artists and their fans have misaligned incentives. Artists would like to make a living (or at least some money) with their music, while fans started accumulating lots of music for free through filesharing. So we decided to make every fan a co-owner of the songs they love. 

We had high hopes for this new model to change the way music is sold in the digital age, but we weren’t able to realize this promise. One reason is that margins on 99¢ downloads are small, and they’re even smaller when you’re allotting part of it to fund rewards for previous buyers. So it’s inherently difficult to turn a music download store into a profitable business. 

But it was also hard to convince those who control the music rights to come on board. Steve Jobs had the vision and clout to make a huge dent in the music download market, but few others have successfully followed suit, and that’s not because no one after him has tried. 

Finally, we have ourselves to blame because we probably could have been much more aggressive in convincing labels and distributors to sign up for our idea. When you run a startup, nothing you do is ever enough.

We think (and we’ve heard many times) that our model is still promising, and we hope to apply it to other markets than just music downloads in the future. In the meantime, if you're interested in licensing our technology, talk to us. 

If you’re a Popcuts user, you’ll be able to spend any remaining balance in your account on music until March 31. After that date, we’ll turn off the lights.  

We’ve had a great time building and maintaining a community where artists and their fans interact, but now the time has come to move on to new things. We’d like to thank everyone who supported us along the way. The UC Berkeley School of Information, Y Combinator, our friends and family, and all the great artists and music fans who became part of this experiment. 

 

All the best!

 

The Popcuts Team
Yiming, Kevin and Hannes

 

P.S.: If you’d like to be informed about any new developments around Popcuts and its founding team, follow us on Twitter or Facebook, subscribe to our blog, or or sign up to a (very infrequent) newsletter here: 

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It's winter (at least in parts of the world). Berlin, where part of Popcuts is based, has been snowed in for a week. And as the holiday season approaches, our music catalog fills up with music to get you in the mood.

Here's a rundown of holiday music, just out on Popcuts:

Alex Eden of Side Tracked Records in L.A. starts us off with a jazzy, swingy tune: 
Alex Eden - Jingle Jangle Party (on Christmas Day)

Todd Carey dreams about that perfect Christmas day in his mellow, slow, acoustic guitar piece: 
Todd Carey - Perfect Christmas Day

Already well-liked on Facebook, New Jersey's Brianna Brice's new Christmas tune is quickly becoming a hit on Popcuts: 
Brianna Brice - The Christmas Song

Also coming from New Jersey, Popcuts band Tangle Town uploaded their holiday song for this year: 
Tangle Town - Those Holidays

And, finally, Russian-born, singer-songwriter Marina V offers her take on holiday loneliness: 
Marina V - Christmas Is Going To Suck (Without You)

In other news, check out "The Relationship", the side project of Weezer guitarist Brian Bell. Their self-titled debut album is out now: 
The Relationship - The Relationship

Have a great winter!

Team Popcuts

Popcuts has suffered a downtime of several hours yesterday (November 4). The reason for this outage was a power interruption due to a fire near the datacenter that houses our servers. All systems are back to normal now, and we have suffered no data loss. We apologize to our users for  the service interruption! The Popcuts team

Last week, we launched a new feature on our site that can get you free music! When you invite others to Popcuts, we reward you when they buy their first song. That's right: When someone signs up using your personal invite link and buys their first song, we'll give you a free song. (Only one condition: You must have already bought at least one song.)

How does it work?

If you're a signed-up Popcuts user, go to http://www.popcuts.com/invite to find your personal invite link. Give this link to your friends, share it on Twitter and Facebook, or email it, so we know you sent 'em. When someone signs up using that link and buys their first song, we'll add 99 cents to your account.

We hope you enjoy this offer!

-Team Popcuts

Holiday greetings from the Popcuts Team! Today we're pleased to announce Popcuts for Causes. Now when you buy a song, that song can raise money for the cause or charity of your choice. Popcuts has always given money back to fans, but now we're letting fans "pay it forward" to those in need. It's simple: just find a song you love, and at checkout, select an organization to sponsor. After that, your Popcuts rewards for that song will go into the fund for that cause, along with others' donations. Every time we hit $5, we'll cut a check and notify the fans who made a difference. For the holidays, you can even make a Popcuts for Causes gift purchase! Music can be that great gift. And donating money on someone's behalf is really cool too. Now your Popcuts purchase can be the best of both. For right now, we've begun our giving campaign with four awesome organizations:

• Kiva.org - A cutting edge organization for good, connecting people through lending for the sake of alleviating poverty.
• DonorsChoose.org - An online charity that makes it easy to help students through donations to individual teacher's projects.
• Electronic Frontier Foundation - The leading civil liberties group defending your rights in the digital world.
• Amnesty International - A worldwide movement of people who campaign for internationally recognized human rights for all.

Just in time for this season of giving, Popcuts reminds you to support music that gives back. - Team Popcuts

See the Facebook photoset.

Yesterday at the a2n #camp, together with Petar Djekic from mufin, I facilitated a discussion entitled "The Day Ownership Died - Why still own music?" It was an all-out interesting discussion, and we touched upon a wide range of interesting topics.

A good deal of the time was spent discussing the pros and cons of streaming music versus having a local library of digital sound files. Another recurring theme was the demise of physical, tangible and sensual media to store sound recordings. Participants expressed that the less tangible and the more virtual their sound recordings were, the more people felt that their sense of "ownership" in these items faded away.

During the discussion, I noticed that the distinction between "streaming" and "owning" was a bit misleading, as it focuses too much on technology. There are gray areas, such as owning MP3 files but storing them somewhere in the cloud and retrieving them on demand. So instead I proposed to look at these two concepts as "buying" music versus "renting" it.

But this contrast can also be understood as a dichotomy between permanent versus transient music artifacts: Most of us grew up in an environment where indiviuals owned large music collections, conserved as sound recordings on various media. But of course, it wasn't always like this. Four or so generations ago, the concept of recording sound was unknown. Music was intrinsically for the moment. After the last note was played, the performance was gone. So before we had physical, tangible, sensual media like vinyl with its beautiful cover artwork, we had no media at all!

If you plot these two dimensions – permanent versus transient, and sensual versus virtual, you end up with a picture like this.

It's clear that we somehow started out in the upper right quadrant: Ephemeral, but very sensual musical experiences. We then moved along counter-clockwise, and for a few decades lived primarily in the land of somewhat sensual sound recordings that could be listened to over and over again, and some of which we cherished as rarities, as treasures.

More recently, with the advent of CDs and MP3s, sound recordings have become less physical, and more virtual, even though the sound recordings haven't changed (if you ignore media-inherent artifacts such as vinyl noise). Now with the rise of streaming services such as Last.FM and Spotify, it looks like the pendulum is once again swinging back into the realm of the transient. Consumers have access to music but don't put value into "owning" it anymore. They simply consume it on-demand, and after it's played, it's gone.

But I feel like this picture is misleading. Firstly, it's a short-term extrapolation. We observe streaming services becoming more popular, we look at software services moving to the cloud, and we project a similar future for music. Secondly, I sense a contradiction between die-hard music fans wanting to identify with their favorite band, wanting to own part of what they love, and merely having access to music like turning on a water faucet. I think it's much more reasonable to assume that the two concepts – streaming music and owning sound recordings – will live side by side for a rather long time.

Which brings me to my final point: Can the concept of owning music be redefined? If digital sound recordings are ubiquitous, readily available, and replicable at zero cost and loss of quality, how can we even speak of owning something any more? Which is why I'm so glad to see services like Sellaband enrich the music ecosystem. They provide fans the opportunity to develop a more meaningful connection with their favorite artists, and the fans can feel like they own more than just access to a sound recording.

Of course, with Popcuts, we aim to do just that, as well: We want to extend the sense of ownership. When you buy a song, and it's in your interest that that song does well and becomes popular, it's a whole different game. You can brag about discovering a band early, or silently enjoy the satisfaction of being a great trendspotter. But it's more than the mere, passive "access" to music. Because music's not water.

Popkomm used to be Germany's premier music conference, originating in Cologne and more recently held in Berlin annually. However, this year, the event was canceled.

But it turns out, that's not neccessarily bad: In an impressive show of determination, creativity and organizational talent, Berliners from all backgrounds have scrambled to replace Popkomm with something more contemporary, more open-source and more flexible. Dubbed all2gethernow, next week in Berlin will be all about determining where the music ecosystem is heading and what can be done to navigate out of its crisis.

Popcuts is proud to be there. At the bar-camp-style part of the event, on September 16 and 17, there will be a Popcuts booth, but we're also hosting a roundtable discussion about

Music Access vs. Ownership –  What does it mean to 'own' music these days?

We hope to spark a discussion about the fading sense of ownership in music. If digital recordings are readily available at practically zero cost, what's the difference between owning a song and having access to it? We want to explore ways to make owning a recording meaningful again (and of course, being Popcuts, we have some ideas of our own).

In cooperation with Petar Djekic from mufin on Thursday, September 17 at 12.30pm.

See the full #camp schedule here.

Let us know if you're coming!

We've been nominated as panelists for next year's SXSW Music. Giannii, a community manager at Disqus and composer, is spearheading a session about "The Evolution of Music." We seek to bring together artists and people from the online music space to determine where things are headed. Other speakers would be eMusic, Paul Dateh and Soundcloud.  A lot of panels at SXSW Interactive have thrown around new models for music, but we're excited to be embraced by the rockstars at SXSW Music.

But we need your help getting there! Please take a minute to register and vote at the SXSW Panel Picker. You'll have to sign up, and we'd be really grateful if you did!

To vote, visit: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/4980

To sweeten the deal a little bit, we're giving away prizes for people who vote for us! To participate in the raffle, simply send an email to sxsw@popcuts.com, telling us that you've voted in support of our panel (honor system!).  First prize will win $50 in Amazon Gift Certificates.  Second prize will win $50 in Popcuts credit.  And Third prize will win a gift package complete with Popcuts gear, autographed albums, and free concert tickets! If you're a winner, you'll hear back from us by September 6.

And the Bonus Prize: If this panel makes the final cut, we'll give away a free pass to SXSW (either Interactive or Music – your choice) to one randomly drawn participant!

Thanks, and we hope to see you in Austin next year!

Team Popcuts

EDIT: Voting got extended till 11:59 CST on Monday evening, September 7. We'll let winners know after that!

In our latest release, we made some significant changes to the user leaderboards on Popcuts. Our primary view now shows who's been doing particularly well recently (that is, which of our users have earned the most rewards in the last month). We did this mainly to make it easier for newcomers to get noticed and emphasize that everyone can profit from buying cool songs early!

In addition, we now have a view called "Smartest Buyers" where we show those that have the best spending-earning ratio.

We're curious to hear your feedback on the revised People page, and we're always open to suggestions and ideas, especially if they enable our users to get a better view of our data!

Team Popcuts