It's funny how some people will read a few lines of a news article (rather than reading the whole thing) and then post rants on the internet which are full of 'assumptions'; however, that's exactly what goes on more often than not these days. There have already been rants on the internet following the BBC article yesterday where people have taken the report and made false claims rather than simply reading the article and understanding what we are doing with Kerchoonz!!

Yesterday, the BBC ran an article about a new social networking service that we have been developing for the past couple of years called Kerchoonz. Kerchoonz allows musicians, film makers, comedians and the like to upload their content and whenever the public listen or download their stuff, the artists get paid. The public get the goods for free and the artistic people get compensated. That's how it works. There is absolutely no DRM, no adverts attached to the files and the files come directly from the source: the copyright holders. The site will operate via an ad-funded model, but, the ads are non-invasive for the users. It's a social networking platform that is jam-packed with loads of fun features for the users and even lets you incorporate your myspace, youtube, and other social networking pages; so, you can keep in touch with everybody while using the service.

Basically, the BBC headline was: "Musician bids to beat net pirates". It's a good headline and considering what I've been through over this past summer, it makes sense that the BBC decided to use it as a headline. Piracy is a current issue and a lot of musician's (especially new independent musicians) are much worse off because of it. Not because more people are accessing or listening to their music, but because less and less people are willing to take the risk to invest in new music these days. But, to be honest, Kerchoonz isn't on any anti-piracy agenda, we just want to help artistic people earn their living while giving the public what they want for free.

So, I just want to tell you straight from the source, Kerchoonz was not designed to 'beat' anyone. Kerchoonz was designed to provide free and legal access to music and art and help compensate the creators at the same time. It is not in competition with myspace or youtube, pirates, or anyone else; in fact, the site encourages users to post links to myspace and youtube and any other social networking site. If a musician doesn't want to give their music away for free, but still wants to be paid for streams, they can do that too and post links to shops who sell their music. But, if they decide to give their music away as a free download, they will get paid anyway. We will be providing value to the users by giving them the content that they want, supporting art financially, giving people tools to help promote their art, and supplying users with a clean and interactive atmosphere. And, we've taken all the steps to ensure that it's legal by working with the music societies over the past year. We just want to help make the playing field 'fair'. So, if you're a fan, you can get the goods for free and you'll be really supporting the artist at the same time. That's how it works.

BBC radio scotland ran a piece about it in newdrive which you can access by going to the BBC iplayer, (newsdrive for Friday, August 28th, 2008) and I think that a piece will be on BBC 1 Reporting Scotland some time next week. So, you can either tune in or keep an eye on my blog and I'll post a link here when it runs.

In the meanwhile, I wish you all a great weekend.

xx
indy