The New York Times yesterday broke the story of a nascent partnership between Blue Note and Artistshare. (Thanks Kim Macari for the spot). The essence of how it will work is in the following tightly worded paragraph, which we have expanded out..

 “The new arrangement — orchestrated by Brian Camelio, the founder of ArtistShare; Bruce Lundvall, chairman emeritus of Blue Note; and Don Was, Blue Note’s president — will essentially serve as a low-risk development arm of the label.

Blue Note will help select the artists, and apply its imprimatur and promotional resources to each finished album.

But the costs of recording will be shouldered by fans, in the standard mode of ArtistShare projects.

Musicians will retain full ownership of their master recordings.”

COMMENT: (Possibly stating the obvious) there are bound to be a few attention-grabbing success stories from this new tie-up. And then, there will be the rest…The article also pointed out that Artistshare has been pursuing Kickstarter for patent violation for over two years.