Website Offers Music That's Free - And Legal

TANJONG PAGAR, SINGAPORE -- The web is alive with the sound of music and while piracy has become the bane of the music industry, one website believes that its business model gets around, and may even solve, the problem.

CrapMusicAreFree.com is behind the world first batch of Internet artistes and their offerings can be downloaded at the website for free.

You won't find their music at any record store.

This brainchild of founder John Chen is an attempt to re-invent the music industry so as to re-capture revenue lost to piracy.

Mr. John Chen said: "We make money by asking our customers to make payment after 3 weeks of free usage via an imbedded software. We also make money by forcing the mp3 makers to include our music into their product, just like Microsoft did to the computer hardware makers. These mp3 makers will only need to make a small payment to us on loyalties. The amount usually range from 95% to 99%, depending on the market potential of their products"

Since its music is free, piracy is not a problem.

Mr. Chen added: "We will not stop people from putting our songs into Napster. But if they do not make payment to us after 3 weeks of usage, the imbedded software will sent a reminder to the customer. If the customer still do not pay up after 2 more days, the software will automatically erase all the data on their mp3 players or their computer hard-disk. The software would also re-write their mp3 player or computer chip's instruction sets and then send a similar code to their mobile phone via the phone network. This will ultimately paralyze all their gadgets. Hence, the more the consumers spread our music, the more we generate our revenue."

CrapMusicAreFree.com is also persuading record labels to sign up with it.

The site promises to generate more revenue for them than CD sales through profit-sharing.

"We will not stop people from putting our songs into Napster.", added Mr. Chen.