In Conversation With John Buckman, CEO of Magnatune

10:35 | Kiruba Shankar | Jun 25th, 2007 3:05pm |

John Buckman is a serial entrepreneur, a musician, a marketeer and an open media evengelist, but he’s better known as the CEO of Magnatune, an indpendent, profitable online record label whose tagline closely matches that of Google’s: “We are not evil.”

Ask any musician and he’ll tell you about the unfair treatment and high-handedness of big record labels. They always call the shots and take most of the revenues. John Buckman saw an opportunity here. He created an artist-friendly label that not only shares profits equally with musicians but also allows them to retain the rights to their work.

John sits on the board of Creative Commons and it’s no wonder that he has successfully used the open source principles to establish a unique kind of business model for the music industry.

Prior to founding Magnatune, Buckman founded Lyris Technologies in 1994. Lyris sells software for email newsletters and spam prevention. The company was generating $12 million in annual revenues when Buckman sold it in 2005.

(photo by: Joi Ito)

Tags: John Buckman, entrepreneur, Magnatune, Creative Commons, open source, Lyris Technologies

This entry was posted on Monday, June 25th, 2007 at 3:05 pm and is filed under PodTech, Enterprise 2.0, India. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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