I know. But I couldn't think of another way to start small.
If usage grows hopefully artists will actively promote their desired 'fund receiving' email address.
The next step would of course be that artists can signup and the whole email address finding step would be dropped
I was also wondering: is there no transfer fees with paypal ? Don't they make small amounts transfer useless ?
And one last thing: is it not weird for bands/artists to suddenly receive money from people without being informed about the site and all that ?
'the way gittip does this': I naively assumed Gittip was sitting on the money until it was claimed, but charging the moment its claimed is probably better. I'll have to look into it!
'transfer fees with paypal': Yes and yes. I'm currently spending about 8-10 dollars a week divided over 5 artists. So the slice Paypal gets is significant but bearable. This of course isn't ideal and I've been thinking about other ways of doing this. Bitcoin maybe?
'receive money (...) without being informed': I've got this covered! When an artist receives money they also receive an email explaining why they receive it and how many times the listener played their songs.
I think you have a phenomenal idea.
I worked in the bitcoin space for a while (cofounded an exchange), and this was a proposal that often came up. so awesome to see someone actually building it. Could I convince you to send me an email: Jordanbirn at gmail.com ?
That gittip suggestion down there is also great. I'm in touch with a bunch of artists who would totally love that.
Please keep building this.
Artists' email addresses aren't shared right now (bc then it would be easy to pollute with wrong addresses). So this also answers your second question (Unless someone listens to two bands with the same name). It remembers for your own account though, so you don't have to fill out the same address twice.
You hook up your last.fm profile and each week you get to divide an x amount of money between the artists you listened to. I've been using it myself for about a year now.
The only catch is that you need to find the email addresses of artists you want to pay to yourself, so they can be paid with PayPal.
This 'catch' allowed me to use it as single user for a year though so its very usable for me in this stage. Feel free to try it! Let me know what you think!