MUMBAI: While more than a few record labels rally behind the three strikes and your out... approach ISP providers are being urged to adopt in tackling illegal mp3 sharing, Aardvark Records is taking a customarily different approach. The independent label is paying its artists' fans to share music.

The label is adopting a new method to encourage people to share and pay for its tunes - by turning fans into retailers. Aardvark launched its own branded digital music download store today after signing a licensing agreement with the online music platform People's Music Store (http://peoplesmusicstore.com/aardvark)  The store allows users to design and open their own storefront, selecting a batch of songs from a library and then selling them; earning themselves 10% of the profits to use towards buying new music.

How big can an individual store be?  Users can sell up to 50 DRM-free albums from a indecently wide range of high-quality electronica, rock, pop and other music.

People's Music Store was founded by Ged Day, who launched Bleep.com for Warp Records -- "the first" DRM free 320 Kbps MP3s store, back in 2004. This is a key factor in the platform's credibility  If it all sounds rather like Burn Lounge, you couldn't be further from the truth. People's Music Store is a completely different animal, not only due to its cred-laden genesis as part of Warp/Bleep, but because it never charges storefront owners. Storefront owners only have respect and free music to gain so they have no incentive to barrage people with spam.

Aardvark director, Alex di Savoia, said: While this solution isn't going solve the situation of illegal, it is a cooler, friendlier way forward for the music industry. It was a short hop, skip and a jump away from our established practice of encouraging fans to share our embeddable music widgets. Now, fans receive a reward from sharing… accruing points which count towards free music....

We're thrilled to be working with Aardvark. The label has a wide range of genres which fit nicely into our platform,... said people's Music Store founder Ed Underwood 

"I think People's music Store addresses the 'peer to peer' issue, by enabling 'peers' to advocate legitimacy themselves," said co-founder Ged Day when speaking about the appeal of people's Music Store for labels and music lovers. "As is standard for music download services (Bleep, iTunes, etc.), artists and labels are paid a cash royalty for all sales. Our standard split is 60/40 in favour of the supplier and this applies whether the customer paid using cash or points."