Jane Siberry: set your own music price

Jane Siberry is a brilliant lyricist and musician, and then she went indie, and I gather had to spend vast amounts of time doing accounting and businessy things rather than creating. "She took a course in sales..." I think that business diversion was not such a good direction for her. Her latest idea is... to let her users decide how much to pay.

Canadian musician Jane Siberry is no longer selling or making CDs. All of her songs published since the early 1980s are available for download on her Website only. The twist is that fans can pay whatever they want for a song - including nothing. Siberry calls it "Self-Determined Pricing".

from Future Tense: Jane Siberry ditches CDs, lets fans determine price for her digital music

(You can listen to RealAudio of the story.)

Individual MP3s @ 128kbps, or a combined download (.zip file) at 192kbps.

I highly recommend her first album, Jane Siberry from 1981.

This approach reveals some issues with our technology.
MP3 good.  But there's no (easy, built-in) way in an MP3 to say "distribute this freely, but come to this site if you want to pay for the music".  Right now Jane controls the means of production, distribution, and payment.

That means the more popular her downloads get, the more she will have to pay for bandwidth.
That sucks.  There needs to be a way out of the distribution business.  She should be able to set the bits free on a peer-to-peer network, e.g. BitTorrent, while still being assured that those who enjoy the music will be able to click back to her site to pay.