For some unknown reason someone [or a group of people] have been hitting Magnatune hard with credit card fraud, to the point where the company was dropped by their payment processor.

This is a great example of how a good company [and one that helps artists worldwide] gets harassed by ‘criminals’ only to find itself punished by the very same people whose inadequate systems are responsible for the mess in the first place: Visa. John Buckman reports that Magnatune saw ⅓ of its subscriber base disappear due to this change [Magnatune is now depending on PayPal for its credit card transactions and the fact that each payment goes via another entity makes it slightly harder to charge the recurring fees subscriptions bring, without asking the users to register with PayPal etc].

As regular readers may have noticed, I am a great fan of Magnatune; both ethically and artistically I find their effort and business commendable and I have, over the years, found several excellent albums from that company. I hope that things get better for them soon. As a sidenote, I really wonder why someone would hit Magnatune in this manner. Clearly it’s not aimed at getting hold of the music, given that you can get the tracks for free anyway…

It was written by ORG’s Michael Holloway, who did an incredible job of synthesizing information from our web site, interviews with me, and my dozens of comments.