Paying Artists Online: RepliCounts for New E-commerce

mass sponsorship: content is free while the artists get paid

What's New Here?

It might sound bizarre, but the key technical innovation is to let online financial accounts replicate (reproduce). These accounts can have "children" accounts, grandchildren, and family trees -- new accounts, independent of their parent although mostly a copy of it. Our RepliCounts™ design may be the only replicating accounts proposed so far, the first in the history of money.

Account replication was never possible until recently. It could become critically important.

Why Use Account Replication?

• Replicating accounts can manage hundreds or even thousands of different settings gracefully. (3) New accounts can inherit complex customization instantly and effortlessly, at birth. So replicating accounts can do all kinds of tricks not feasible with ordinary online accounts like your checking account or PayPal.
• Many capabilities can be inside the account itself, seamlessly integrated with money. For example, the same account that knows credit-card permissions and currency conversions can also know music and video download formats, relevant laws and tax tables, tools for doing business in different languages and countries, and how to use transaction data to generate dozens of real-time accounting, marketing, and other reports at the owner's request. The account owner may also publish real-time displays, reports, and interactive options through a public dashboard, for almost anyone to use.
• Radical ease of use: for most people, the "learning curve" will be zero. Almost all RepliCounts users will never even need to hear about RepliCounts at all -- or learn anything new. They will just click for (legal) free access to music, news, etc. exactly as they do now. Maybe about 2% of these users will purchase sponsorships, for many reasons, using the same familiar e-commerce they already know (bank cards, PayPal, etc.).
• There's no "network effect" barrier, no critical mass of users needed up front before a new system becomes useful. The first artist or journalist to use RepliCounts could do so successfully, even if nobody else on the planet had ever heard of the idea. The artists or their representative have a learning curve for using a merchant RepliCount, but free users and most sponsors could happily use this system without ever learning anything about it.
• No new software needs to run on your computer. The server controls everything, improving security -- and letting RepliCounts work across browsers and operating systems. And unlimited throwaway RepliCounts will allow otherwise-grotesque but sometimes useful security restrictions, (4) opening doors to new tradeoffs between convenience and security.
• These accounts can even evolve, (5) -- changing over time through what might be called natural-person selection, to serve human rather than corporate needs.

Example: Mass Sponsorship for Artists, Journalists, Others

By mass sponsorship we mean letting anyone easily sponsor a particular song, article, or other digital content they want, with no limit on number of copies. Sponsors can add their own personal message (about anything) if they wish -- and direct their sponsorship through social networks of their choice. Someone who loves a particular song, cartoon, documentary, or investigative article can sponsor just that; someone who wants to outreach to people who love the art or article may sponsor it as well. See list of incentives for sponsors.

For example, a sponsor might buy 5, 50, 500, 5,000, or any number of prepaid downloads of a song, video, image, or other work that moves him or her, perhaps at a low bulk price like 25 cent each (set by the artist). The sponsor will receive the sponsorship inside a smart URL (explained later) -- either a new one, or an existing smart URL that already circulates in attractive social networks worldwide. Anyone can click a smart URL once to reach a public dashboard, click again to change its language (English, Spanish, Chinese...) if desired, then click again to download music, etc., free and hassle-free while the artist gets paid. (6)

Every sponsored download will pay the artist(s) -- even though it's totally free to the user. Since pirate copies that do not pay the artist(s) must compete against equally free ones that do, there should be little or no need for DRM (copy protection or deliberate incompatibility), lawsuits against copying, or other unpleasantness. (7)

Note the ease of monetization of RepliCounts systems. (8)

For more on mass sponsorship, see the Sponsors and the Artists pages.

Open-Access Project, Available to All

We created this project as a free and open-source design, with no claim of ownership rights. (9) The design is already complete enough to begin testing software, and available without further permission for anyone's open-source and/or proprietary software projects. Our goal is to get these ideas "onto the table" for public discussion and use.

Page updated 2010-06-17