This strikes me as a totally worthwhile endeavor, and I encourage your interest and participation:

Hello

Over the past several months, we have been planning and developing a project that allows artists to easily distribute their music freely on the Internet. The program produced by the Gnomoradio project will allow listeners to easily find music that may be of interest to them. It will be free software, licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

There are many benefits for musicians and users alike associated with the free distribution of music. Free distribution of some or many songs allows an artist to gain exposure, increasing sales of merchandise, recordings, and concert tickets. It will also allow a community to form where information and artistic works are shared freely. Right now, we are calling for artists who are interested in such a system to label their music for free distribution so that it can be available when Gnomoradio is released in the coming weeks.

Already, a community has formed where computer programs are developed and shared freely. The free software community has produced great software such as GNU/Linux, Apache, Mozilla, and GNOME. The Gnomoradio program will also be free software, and it will initially run in the GNOME desktop environment. It will be able to sort, organize, choose, and play music based on a user's inferred listening preferences. It will also download and play new songs that the user is likely to enjoy, based on a comparison of the user's ratings with the ratings of other people. In addition, it will act as a peer-to-peer file transfer program, allowing the music to be downloaded from the fastest location possible, thus conserving bandwidth on the artist's behalf. The method of obtaining the song will simply be transparent to the user. Songs will be identified by an Internet address (a URL) which will point to information about the song, a machine-readable license, a method of verifying the downloaded song, a link to the artist's web site, and information about purchasing any available recordings of the song. This will be based on the great work that the Creative Commons project has done in machine-readable licensing in the open RDF/XML formats.

Some people may wonder why we are writing yet another peer-to-peer file transfer protocol and music player. In fact, there are already many programs that allow people to share files on a peer-to-peer network. Many of these programs expose much of the file-transfer protocol to the user. Often, a user will get a listing of many identical files, or slightly different versions of the same thing. Also, there is no way of verifying that the resource is the exact resource you are looking for. Gnomoradio will take care of all of these details and obtain a song through the best means. Since Gnomoradio only automatically shares songs under free licenses, legal issues surrounding peer-to-peer file transfers are no longer an issue. All transfers can be done in the open, and only those artists that wish to participate and allow people to distribute their music freely will participate.

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