Before I begin I have to state that the prices mentioned here are in British Pounds. So for those of you who, like most people, scoff at the thought of the Pound, use the following conversion: £1 = $1.57. Sound good? Then I’ll begin.

Answer me this. What if you could spend your money on music knowing that 50% of it goes to the charity of your choice? Surely, you’d buy more to give more? The great news is, is that in the UK there’s a new online store that does exactly that! From the millions of songs FairShareMusic sells online, they vow to give at least half of its net profits to charities that focus on major issues such as world hunger, cancer research and endangered species.

When you think about it, what’s truly great is the more music you download the more donations are made to charities all over the world, and this concept is all down to Lee Cannon and Jonny Wolf, the founders of FairShareMusic. It’s their belief that music has the power to inspire and motivate,

“We stimulate change in giving by promoting social action, connecting people and charities through music — making it easier for people to give directly to a cause through something they’re passionate about, whilst promoting further a culture of giving and increasing the amount existing donors give to charity”, co-founder Lee Cannon stated recently to Mashable.

With prices as low as 79p for a single a track, and as high as £7.99 for a full album, FairShareMusic’s sales and customer numbers have steadily grown over the last 12months,

“Unique visits are converting into registrations at approximately 6%, with 98% going on to purchase. 62% of registered customers have bought more than once, and our average basket size is almost double the UK average at £7.20”, Cannon said.

How to Use FairShareMusic

You know how to ride a bike right? Well, it’s not like that. I’d compare it to Amazon, iTunes, Play.com, and any other extremely simple and efficient e-Commerce site. You simply pick the songs (or albums), pick the charity you truly care about, choose how you want to pay (credit card or PayPal) and “Place your Order”.

I highly recommend signing up to FairShareMusic, or logging in with your Facebook account first and then you can happily shop around without getting interrupted when you want to proceed to the checkout.

The songs even integrate into your iTunes or Windows Media libraries, with no extra software required, and as I currently type, FairShareMusic is optimizing the store for mobile and will eventually release Android and Blackberry apps.

How charitable is it?

So what portion of your actual payment goes to “your” charity?

FairShareMusic clearly state that 50% of their net profit goes to your chosen charity. Put simply, if you were to download a single track at 79p, this is what happens:

• 14p in Tax as VAT (Value Added Tax, which is the UK sales Tax)
• 57p goes to the Record Label and Music Publisher
• 4p goes to the Bank for processing your payment
• And finally, 4p goes to your charity

I know what you’re thinking. What’s 4p in cents? About 6cents.

Seriously though, only 4p goes to the charity? It doesn’t sound a lot, but quite honestly when was the last time you (and me included) donated as much as a dime to charity? In my opinion what FairShareMusic is doing is very honorable, and if they can donate 4p for a single track (32p for an album) to the various charities, then they’re doing something right.

My only concern is how much the record company and music publisher receive from the sale. Surely they could be more charitable and request less of a share? Maybe in time they will. Then again, with the state of the music industry as it is, it’ll be a long, long time before they feel like giving. I’ll save my opinion on that for another time.