A new online music service called Poptopus claims to offer musicians a chance to actively make money when their music is streamed on the internet. The Poptopus music player is a widget that plays MP3s and shows video adverts at the same time. It can be placed on blogs (and, one would assume, Myspace pages – though I’m sure MS will make life difficult for Poptopus as Snocap is trying similar things), where visitors can listen to a stream of music from artists in the Poptopus catalogue. As an artist you can submit your music to the database, and earn a cut from the advertising revenue (as can bloggers who place the player on their site).

It’s a great idea, and we can only hope that they manage to sign up some good advertising before they launch – although considering the site hasn’t been updated for months and we’ve heard nothing from them since signing up to their ‘newsletter’ at the beginning of May, it doesn’t look good. It would be typical of advertisers not to see the potential in an idea like this, and just consider it too risky an investment.

Revver were the first user gen site to start paying contributors, and YouTube looks like they’ll be following that pioneering example, so here’s hoping the major music platforms will take note of Poptopus in the same way.

Napoleon IIIrd – Defibrillator

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