onezero music is an online store selling downloadable music files from a variety of artists, and in a variety of genres. As a onezero artist, you give onezero non-exclusive rights to offer these tracks online--you can do what you want with them elsewhere.

You retain the copyright to your work. You retain the rights to sell mp3s, CDRs or CDs of your music wherever you like. The agreement between onezero and the artist is severable by either party on 60 days notice.

onezero works on a joint venture model with the artist--after expenses (usually just the payment processing fee), the artist and onezero split the proceeds from the sale of tracks or albums 30-70 (that's 30% to onezero and 70% to the artist). This is much more favorable to the artist than the usual slippery label accounting. If we're all lucky and your sales reach over $600 for the year, onezero will issue you a 1099. onezero strongly suggests that you pay estimated quarterly taxes on your earnings and get familiar with the self-withholding process if you're not already. This is a great place to start collecting the information, publications, and forms you'll need.

When one of your tracks or albums is sold on onezero, the payment processing company takes a cut of the purchase price. The size of this cut depends on the total cost of the order. In most cases, the processing costs will be the only costs borne by a track or album. (As hosting is a fixed yearly cost at the moment, and more tracks are being added all the time, it seems unfair to make early tracks pay more for hosting than later tracks, etc. So hosting comes out of the onezero budget, not out of the tracks.) It's possible, however, that an artist might want a special promotion for an album or track, in which case an additional percentage will go toward paying off the promotion. (Exactly what percentage will be worked out in advance between onezero and the artist.)

By the way, onezero doesn't offer any advances, as they're just a way of getting artists indebted to a company. Everyone's better off without them. Nor do we cover recording or mastering costs at the moment, but that may change in the future.

OK, so this sounds good to you, and you'd like to put some tracks up here. What do you do?

You'll notice as an artist that there's no "signup" form. In addition to being a store, onezero is also a record label and behaves like one--someone makes editorial decisions about whose files will be made available. And since onezero is a small operation, I'm the person making the decisions. So rather than have a whole slew of people I don't know signing up and putting whatever on the site, I invite people whose work I like, and with whom I'd like to work. During this initial stage, due largely to disk space limitations, this group is mostly people I know or have performed with in some capacity, but I'd be very interested in hearing from people who want to work with onezero.

So how do you get on the list? Send an . Let's discuss what you're doing, and see if it fits. (Please do not email digital music files. Just send some text first.)