Folks, we’ve talked about free music before – and I’m sure we will again. But today I’m going to tell you about a site called guvera.com, and how they have a new marketing concept that challenges everything you know about music piracy, the recording industry as a whole, and advertising concepts.

Wait, that sounded dull and boring. How about this: free music downloads. LOTS of them.

See, there are a lot of reasons why people download songs illegally. I’m not an advocate of piracy, let me just get that established right now. But I do see the rationale that music pirates use. The price-fixing, the bundling of songs you like with filler content, the aggressive and irrelevant advertising on sites like iTunes or audible… it’s getting to be a major problem.

But how can a company compete with free?

It’s taken ten years for Guvera to get off the ground. They had to negotiate a tortuous process, convincing record labels to accept and adopt a new concept: Don’t compete with free. Use free.

At Guvera, you pick the song you want to download. Then, choose a sponsor from a list of advertisers. The sponsor pays for the song, in exchange for you getting the song from their channel. At their channel, you’ll see other songs they sponsor, and can browse through them, too. You only see advertising you have some interest in, which is something called directed marketing and it is very, very valuable to advertisers. In exchange, you get free music.

Again: you get free music. Advertisers get their messages to people who are interested in them. Musicians get paid, in full. Everybody wins.

Why on Earth weren’t we doing this years ago?