imp.fm - The Independent Media Project

A commision-free online content store for independent artists

Everyone at Brain Murmurs is heavily involved in art and music. As practitioners and lovers of the arts we are painfully aware of the degree to which the creativity of artists are exploited by music and publishing industries. Musicians typically realize about 10% of the profits from cd sales of their music. Authors may make slightly more, but by and large it is the company that publishes and distributes the content that takes the lion's share of the profits.

Most musicians either end up forking over a share of their sales revenue in exchange for promotion or suffering the discomfort of hosting their music on MySpace, amidst an onslaught of invasive and frequently offensive advertisements.

Stiff opposition

Rather unusually, we regard artists as first class citizens instead of an exploitable segment of society. The basic idea was to provide artists with a free place to sell their music, writing, and videos that doesn't exploit them or offend their sensibilities.

Dan Pasco, our CEO, pitched this idea to a group of investors called the Keiretsu forum in January. The basic premise was simple: make a site where artists can sell their work for free and add in the voting capabilities of digg. Give the artist all of the profits from their work and generate revenue through discrete advertising

Although several people expressed interest, at least half of the investors thought that the idea of not charging the artist was scandalous - we were sent on our way. It became clear that most local investors would not be able to see past the chance to hit up the artist for their hard earned cash, and it was a virtual certainty that we would lose a lot of creative control once a major investor came on board, so we decided fund the site ourselves using money we raised doing consulting work.

Rage Against the Flavor of the Month

The great thing about IMP is that it provides a new heuristic for determining what is 'good' in music, books and video. Rather than be filtered by a publishing agency for potential marketability, the best content on the IMP site has actually filtered up through its neighbors based on actual consumer feedback.

Benefits

• New content feeds (free)

  Artists are encouraged to make newly uploaded items available free of charge to users on our 'freshest' content feed. This gives the artist immediate exposure to the IMP user base and provides users with a steady stream of free content of mixed quality.

• Content rating system

  Another great feature of IMP is its rating system. Users are provided with a very painless way to provide ratings for all of the content they buy or download. These ratings are used to characterize the overall appeal of the artist's work. We use a velocity algorithm to determine which items are currently getting the highest number of ratings.

• Hot content feeds (variable pricing)

  User ratings are then used to assign a ranking to the content under our 'Hottest' feed. The very best items end up at the top of the 'Hot' list, which can be filtered by genre, price, and license type.

• Payment aggregation

  Our approach to dealing with the issue of micropayments was to use an escrow account to aggregate monies collected on behalf of the artist. Users are billed every two weeks for the content they have purchased. Once the funds have been collected the artists may withdraw their money at any time.

• Responsive AJAX user interface

  The IMP site uses AJAX techniques to provide a user experience more like using a traditional desktop application than a web site. This is particularly evident in the artist's studio, which allows users to click and edit content properties interactively without page reloads.

• Scalable architecture

  Our previous experiences developing scalable information retrieval systems was used extensively in designing IMP, which is implemented in a massively parallel, loosely coupled and architecture. This means that the IMP site will be able to grow with its user base.

• RESTful architecture

  IMP uses an Representational State Transfer API set that allows it to be integrated into third party applications. We are currently developing a feature-rich IMP client for OS X called Impulse that makes heavy use of these APIs.

For more information about IMP, please see our website at imp.fm. You can also keep up on IMP-related news at the IMP blog.