John's piece from today ends: "I hope Emergent Music finds a revenue model too, so these bloggers can get paid for DJ'ing online.  Otherwise, I worry we'll just recreate the world of payola online..."

Luckily we do have an answer to the payola question. People gain quantitative reputations on EM for reliability, which are used to add weight to their recommendations, by historically being consistently accurate: that is, by consistently recommending things that their communities subsequently like.

If someone took payola in return for recommending things that don't deserve to be recommended, then over time their calculated reliability would decrease, and they would lose the power to influence, and stop being paid payola.

The only real long-term "business plan" for an EM DJ is to be reliable (and when blogging is enabled, to have an engaging personal story as well).

Profits then will come from a variety of sources. Physical or digital album and/or stream sales is one set. I won't discuss some of the more speculative ones in this piece, but one possibility we have looked at is payments by artists who want to make their works known more quickly. A precedent is Yahoo -- you don't need to pay anything to get listed by Yahoo, but if you do, they will give a high priority to examining your site and making a listing decision.

Similarly, artists may pay these DJ's/influencers to review their works -- but if the DJ then distorts his reviews toward the positive side, he will lose his influencer status. So he is motivated and rewarded only for accurately reviewing the work. The net result is that if an artist is good, he will be rewarded for paying by getting reviewed faster. But if he isn't good, he will only be rewarded by gaining the knowledge that he may have some more work to do on his music.

The above is something we are looking at that is supported by our underlying technology. We haven't implemented it yet.

At this point our overriding concern with EM is to get it to a critical mass of tens or hundreds of thousands of thousands of users -- then we can focus in on revenue streams.
8:58:15 AM