iTunes affiliate program

A lot of you might be saying, “Dan, your quest to squeeze a nickel out of the eight people who actually read this website has gone too far. The iTunes affiliate program is tackier than the Google AdWords, Gmail invites, and Amazon affiliate links combined.”

And you might be right.

But consider this excellent argument from my favorite tech visionary, Cringely:

This is the end of the RIAA and the big recording industry. Apple in the last year has signed deals with more than 300 independent record labels, most of them not big enough to do much promotion. But now they don’t have to because that promotion will be handled by mtv.com and every music web logger, now that they have a material incentive to make recommendations and print lists. If I recommend a song — IF I JUST TYPE A FEW WORDS — and a thousand people decide to download based on my recommendation, heck, I just made $50 bucks. This is like sending tens of thousands of record sales people out on the road except that they can sell anything THEY like — any of the one million iTunes songs — making them salespeople with real conviction and maybe even with good taste. Maybe.

That’s why I signed up for this particular nickel scheme. As someone with a passion for lots of different kinds of interesting music (and a few weak spots for guilty pleasures), a world that replaces big record business with a horde of music fans (with good taste and free time) is a world I want to participate in.

I played around with the idea yesterday of starting a music-recommendations blog that was totally separate from this one, but I don’t think I have the time and energy for that. Plus, it’s totally being done better elsewhere. I’ll probably focus on putting out an iMix playlist every month, promoting it here, and seeing what happens.

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