Burnlounge

I got this email from a friend a few minutes ago:

I got an email from someone I know who works in the industry suggesting that I sign up for this, that it is supposed to be some kind of HUGE opportunity. I feel like I'm being advised to sign up for Amway or something. I'd never heard of it until today, you heard anything good, bad or otherwise?

Here is the link:

https://reg.burnlounge.com/regstart.asp?storeId=27153#

So what is Burnlounge?

Take a standard Windows Media digital music store and enable the public to create their own mini-stores (playlists) from that store. Instead of marketing the site itself, spin it like the users will be able to go behind the velvet rope and be a part of the music industry.

BL is pretty clever. They shift the marketing burden to the public who then use word-of-mouth on their own produced content (myspace, blogs) to sell their site's music through the affiliate stores. The individual store owners get some kind of cut from their own personal store. It's a pretty cool spin on affiliate relationships. It takes the idea of the iTunes affiliate program (with it's irritating sign up and maintenance process) and puts a more user-friendly interface on it.

I whole heartedly agree that using trusted sources as guides for music discovery is very important. So this site will be interesting to watch, as I think that there's something to be said for de-centralized music consumption. I wonder if the Amazon digital music store will operate in a similar way to really take advantage of the whole long tail.

If I were an iTunes marketing person? (sigh) I'd create a much more user-friendly WYSIWYG store builder and move the whole program management in-house. If they could do for this idea what iWeb did for personal page creation, they'd have another slam dunk on keeping their stranglehold on the digital music marketplace.