Most, if not all, of the people at Brain Murmurs are 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.

Creative control is also an issue. Publishers are desperate to identify and promote the next “flavor of the month.” If an artist’s work is deemed too “fringe” it is unlikely to be carried by a commercial publisher. This means that artists are forced to conform to a publisher’s idea of what constitutes a hit instead of following their own muse. Artists are forced to chose between fulfillment or commercial success.

After a considerable amount of time discussing these realities, we realized that we were actually in a position to do something about this: as artists we have a stake in finding a better way to promote and benefit from our art, as independently funded software engineers we have the power to do something about it.

What we did about it

To this end we conceived IMP, the independent media project. Since the start of the year we have been actively developing the IMP website, which is based on the following ideas:

• that good art should be made easy to find
• that DRM was more trouble than it was worth
• that artists should be compensated fairly for their work
• that this could be done in such a way that the venture could be self-sustaining without going after a share of the artists’ sales revenue.
• that the site should also promote works released under Creative Commons licensing.

Meet IMP

The IMP online community provides a space for artists to promote, distribute, and sell their work. We currently support music, books, and video and expect to accommodate visual arts shortly. In addition to traditional copyrighted works we also provide strong support for Creative Commons licensing. We are particularly interested in supporting the Sony Reader platform and are providing additional resources to help artists produce works for that platform.

No Strings Attached

Publishers traditionally take 30% to 60% of an artists’ revenue. We take nothing. Our site is supported solely through discrete advertising.

A Meritocracy

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. This rating data is used to determine the overall ranking of content within the site.

All new content appears in the sites “Freshest” feed and artists are encouraged to provide an initial number of downloads to users for free to stimulate users to provide an initial sampling of rating data for the system.

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 “Hottest” list, which can be filtered by genre, price, and license type.

The end result is that users have access to a large supply of interesting free content and a refined stream of great paid content.

When do we start?

The IMP site is almost done and we will announce details on a closed beta next week. Artists interested in selling or distributing their work on our site can contact us at imp@brainmurmurs.com.

We will post more on this as we move forward.

Filed under: IMP by Daniel