GnukeBox
About
GnukeBox is a software application and web service designed to distribute music via the internet in a way that provides income for the creators of that music.
GnukeBox can be thought of as a portal into a vast library of artist-contributed music. Anyone may listen for free, and anyone may contribute their own material to the library. Unlike most libraries or audio players, however, GnukeBox also acts as a point-of-sale for contributing artists, and it can be used to create collections of works which can be freely shared across different instances of GnukeBox.
Its key innovation is its ability to provide free music-on-demand in a way which enables and encourages financial support for those who have put their work into that music. The most obvious way it does this is by providing the opportunity for "free plays" of a given track without necessarily releasing that track "into the wild", where it might be easily copied to other devices and decoupled from the artist's interests (but there are others; see /design/revenue). In this sense, GnukeBox can be seem as a digital rights management (DRM) system that includes a media player.
When we say "music", this should be read to mean any kind of audio/visual recording. Most of the recordings in the catalog will probably be music and most of the artists will probably be musicians, but there will undoubtedly be many other kinds of recordings (audio books, drama, comedy) and artists. There is also no technical reason why GnukeBox could not be expanded to handle other types of content such as e-books, fiber-work patterns (kintting, crochet, etc.), or 3d-print designs.