Peoples Music Store Rewards Viral Sales

(UPDATED) The UK People's Music Store empowers fans to set up music stores and choose from more than
250,000 songs, write reviews, and market their store online.
Storekeepers earn points for everything they sell, which can be used to
buy more music.

I met two of the People's Music Store team at Midem and was pleased to learn that they have avoided all of the mulit-level nonsense that doomed some previous attempts to moneitze fan sales; and by their sincere desire to help independent music by enabling fans and rewarding them.  So it came as no surprise when they announced last week that they  had snagged both seed funding from serial media entrepreneur Paul Higgins and a formed partnership with the Beggars Group of indie labels.

Some tracks by popular acts are available including Adele, The Arctic Monkeys, Fleet Foxes, Oasis, Franz Ferdinand and Aphex Twin, and I can a envision creative ways that artists and labels can expose music both via fan stores and by building their own that place their releases alongside other related and perhaps better known music. Though UK based, The People's Music Store supports transactions in USD dollars, Euros and GBPs.

The People's Music Store was started by Ged Day, the founder of Bleep.com and co-founder of Warp…

Films. Ged is committed to putting power in the hands of fans, and has given them full control on the site. Music featured on the homepage is completely democratic, decided based on popularity metrics. Storekeepers also get to decide what bands to stock and how to market the music, allowing passionate music fans to help others discover independent bands or labels.

"I believe the collective knowledge of serious music fans is more compelling and can scale more effectively than any company can do on its own. That's the idea behind People's Music Store – giving fans the power to curate their own online stores, promote their favorite artists, and write about the music they love," said Ged Day, founder of People's Music Store. "We think this will create an authentic, new way for people to discover and purchase music online."

Stores can easily be personalized and promoted on blogs, Facebook or MySpace pages using the widgets on the People's Music Store site. The store is free for users and storekeepers to join and for every product sold, the storekeeper earns 10% as reward points to spend on music.