Artists: Setting Up Mass Sponsorship
Example: How a Band Sells Its Song
This page illustrates RepliCounts by showing a step-by-step example of how artists might use the system. The example applies equally to music, videos, images, poems, investigative articles, database access, or other digitally delivered information that needs to earn money for its creator -- without going through the usually humiliating and unworkable corporate processes and terms. (11)
Note:
- All that's needed for RepliCounts is a server. No new software needs to run on any other computer. (12) No "network effect" or critical mass of users is necessary. Instead, the first artist could use RepliCounts successfully to earn money from digital art -- even if no one else in the world had ever heard of RepliCounts.
- This Web page looks at mass sponsorship -- one use of RepliCounts among many others, but probably the most important use. Note that some of the main concepts you will meet here (especially the smart URL and its public dashboard) do not exist at all in many other uses of RepliCounts.
- In mass sponsorship (but not most other uses), a RepliCount serves as a merchant account.
We suggest starting with the short (under 1,000 word) Introduction and Summary.
How Artists Set Up RepliCounts
Suppose a band (or other artists) produce a digital work and want to sell it through their supporters or otherwise. Here are the steps to for doing so.
- The band visits a server that offers RepliCounts. For this illustration, assume that the server is located at www.automatic-accounts.com. (13).
- The band will be known through a smart URL, in the form www.automatic-accounts.com/Our-Band/Our-Song. (14) "Our-Band" represents the name of the band, for all of its work distributed on this server. The band chooses this name -- and can change it, but there are obvious drawbacks to changing a name after it's in public use.
- The band's first step is to open a RepliCount. The RepliCount's name is secret and must remain so. Whoever is representing the band simply clicks a button to receive a new RepliCount (always by a secure connection); the new account name will usually be a random number assigned by the server. For this example, assume that the server is set to assign 20-digit random numbers as RepliCount names. (15)
- Note: the basic RepliCount has no password. Instead, the secret account name is also the password. This is the system used by numbered bank accounts. We chose to use it here, since RepliCounts users may create many new accounts (sometimes hundreds of them, e.g. for a library to give limited proprietary database access to patrons), and managing hundreds of new passwords would be a hassle. Also, we're tired of entering more than 10 separate fields to make a debit or credit card payment, when a single field could be even more secure. The single field has drawbacks, but they can be overcome by accounts that can reproduce.(16)
- Every RepliCount has an owner's dashboard. The owner or manager can enter this dashboard at any time simply by visiting the RepliCounts website (www.automatic-accounts.com in our illustration here) and pasting the account name into a box provided on the home page for this purpose. Communication with the dashboard must always be secure, and the server will not let the owner make a mistake on this.
At the dashboard, the owner can see various displays showing what's going on with the account -- such as recent transactions, or charts of various kinds of transactions for any time interval (last week, all time, last hour, or any given range of date and time).
And the owner can use the dashboard to change any allowed account settings. A RepliCount may have hundreds of possible settings that the owner could change -- but very few that need to be set up. Almost all of the setting will be inherited from the parent account (most of these simply turned off and ignored). And often an artist's account will start with values set by a similar artist -- or by a professional service, which may integrate the artist's account with a database including local tax tables and other business information. Governments may appreciate getting their sales taxes paid automatically, and instantly when the sales become final.
On the first visit to the owner's dashboard, whoever is setting up the account for the band or other artist(s) will set the name ("Our-Band") above. The band may also set up an optional Web page, seen by anyone who clicks www.automatic-accounts.com/Our-Band.
How Artists Upload a Song or Other Work
When a new song or other artwork is ready, the account owner or manager enters the owner's dashboard and clicks a "New Art" button there. This button creates a new RepliCount, to sell the particular song or other art work. The software does several things:
- It causes the artists' main RepliCount (above) to reproduce, creating a new RepliCount that will be used for the particular song or other content.
- It marks this RepliCount as a public account -- meaning that it has a public dashboard (in addition to the account owner's dashboard). For additional security, a public account can never give any money out (except to its owner, at a secret destination); it can give out valuable content, however, such as a download of a song. (??)
- It asks the owner or manager for information about the song or other art that this RepliCount will distribute (through mass sponsorship) -- especially the name of the song ("Our-Song" for this example). The owner can enter or change this information at any time (but would usually not do so after the name is already in public use). For both security and ease of setup, these pages can be made from standard elements provided by the RepliCounts system, instead of being written
- It reproduces the Web page at www.automatic-accounts.com/Our-Band. The band can (optionally) use this page as a starting point for building a background display, for the public dashboard that anyone who has the smart URL (www.automatic-accounts.com/Our-Band/Our-Song) can visit.
Remember that the artists or their manager can always visit the RepliCount for that particular song or other work, and make changes to it as needed
Distributing the Smart URL
continued ...
Page updated 2010-06-16
This RepliCounts software design by John S. James is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
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A Typical RepliCount
Each oval represents a different, modular service that this account can provide; the uncolored ovals represent services currently turned off. In practice, an account might have several hundred services available, with about 90% of them turned off at any given time.
Account Replication:
In this example the owner of parent account (on top) had it create 3 new "child" accounts -- and the current owners of two of the new accounts have made changes. The owners changed what payment methods the accounts will accept.