Every artist has the same problem of obtaining capital for their next recording. Tune Your World provides the solution of applying micro-financing to the music industry.

Tune Your World is an Open Source music project that enables artists and fans to co-produce new works of art and share in the creative process. Its groundbreaking approach is the creation of peer-to-peer micro-financing of new music projects - enabling fans to deliver start-up capital to aspiring musicians from developing countries. Tune Your World operates on a people-to-people model. Musicians obtain funding for new recordings directly from their fans without giving up ownership or control. The aim is to revitalize the music industry in places where the music industry has never worked very well.

http://www.tuneyourworld.com

Tune Your World is a finalist for May at the Ideablob.com competition where entrepreneurs and small business owners can share and grow their business ideas – and have a chance to win $10,000 towards fulfilling them. CoolBusinessIdeas.com will be highlighting some of the winning ideas weekly.

Guardian.co.uk: In a barn on Oxfordshire Park Farm, Finnish musician Kimmo Pohjonen is holding up a microphone to a six-tonne tractor. "Turn the engine over again, please," he asks the farmer. The barn fills with sound. "Beautiful," he says. "Fabulous."

Pohjonen is Finland's most internationally celebrated contemporary musician and, arguably, the world's only avant-garde accordionist.

Pohjonen's current project, Earth Machine Music, involves him sampling sounds from four English farms, before returning to Finland where he will compose music from these samples. He is returning to perform at these same farms later this month and, at each concert, will blast the samples of that specific farm from his accordion while the farmers pitch in with occasional live tractor accompaniment.

"An environmental art piece" is how he describes it. "I grew up in a small village in northern Finland, so I'm used to being on farms, familiar with their sounds. I like the idea of making music with everyday farm machinery."

Farming today [Guardian.co.uk]

Iconoculture: For anyone who has ever said, "If I had a dollar for every time I turned a friend on to a new band … " — well, now you can cash in, thanks to Surrge.

Publicly launched at this year's South by Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas, Surrge is an iTunes for populists, empowering its listeners, dubbed “scouts,” to act as amateur A&R teams for the online music store. Beyond the usual rewards for exposing undiscovered bands to the masses, Surrge ups the ante by throwing in cold hard cash.

Fans referring bands listed on Surrge to other fans get a percentage of sales on any referrals, and “scouts” who sign up new artists to Surrge get 1% of all future sales from the artist on the site.

In a rapidly evolving music industry where individually powered blogs can wield more consumer tastemaking power than major record labels, old-school concepts like A&R are competing with more egalitarian models. How long before a rash of other user-driven content sites start cashing in on this model?

Show me the money: Surrge incentivizes music fandom [Iconoculture]