I've been in contact with Ethan, an individual who runs Bandcamp (1 of 6 on staff, apparently), and he's starting to talk technical details, so it sounds like they're willing to provide permission to be used as a CoverArt source.
I've written up the initial details of the proposal in http://wiki.musicbrainz.org/Proposal:HasCoverArtAtBandcamp , and it's RFC-298 on the proposals page. This site is pretty easy on all levels. (1) Reading Bandcamp's FAQ (http://bandcamp.com/faq), it was born out of the abhorrent state of digital distribution for everyone who isn't Radiohead and/or [nin]. I'll let some of their story tell the tale: "Earlier this year, one of my favorite bands left their label, recorded a new album, and released it as a digital download from their own website. The hour it was due out, I headed to their site, and after several minutes of watching the page struggle to load, concluded that they were just slammed and made a note to check back the next day. But when I did, the site was, once again, excruciatingly slow. This time I was a bit more patient, made it to the checkout page, entered my billing info, and...the download didn't start. I checked my credit card statement, saw that I'd indeed been charged, and emailed the band. A few days later, the lead singer sent me an apology, along with a direct link to the album's zip file. I did not then forward that link on to my 200 closest friends, but I wondered how many did, and couldn't decide whether it was a good or bad thing that most fans had probably given up before getting this far." "Seemed nuts to us, so we created Bandcamp, the best home on the web for your music. We're not yet another site wanting to host your tracks alongside the trailer for High School Musical 4: I'm Pregnant. Instead, we power a site that's truly yours, and hang out in the background handling all the technical issues you dread (and several you've probably never even considered). We keep your music streaming and downloading quickly and reliably, whether it's 3am on a Sunday, or the hour your new record drops and Pitchfork gives it a scathingly positive review. We make your tracks available in every format under the sun, so the audiophilic nerderati can have their FLAC and eat mp3 v2. We adorn your songs with all the right metadata, so they sail into iTunes with artwork, album, band and track names intact. We mutter the various incantations necessary to keep your site top-ranked in Google, so when your fans search for your hits, they find your music long before they find bonkersforlyrics.com or iMyFace. We give your fans easy ways to share your music with their friends, and we give you gorgeous tools that reveal exactly how your music is spreading, so you can fan the fire." They're great story tellers :). (2) The gist of this site is that they care about music, a lot. They set up the framework so you (as a band member) don't have to care. They care about quality, they care about data completeness, and they REQUIRE YOU to upload music in WAV/AIFF/FLAC, so they can reliably transcode to MP3, WAV, FLAC, Vorbis, ALAC, or AAC. (3) They have an API (http://bandcamptech.wordpress.com/2010/05/15/bandcamp-api/), but all of this data is marked up in artist/release pages as well to the extent necessary for MBz to work with. (4) Legal Justification, again, their words from the FAQ: Does Bandcamp take any ownership rights in my music? Nope. Full details are in our Terms of Use, but the short of it is that the only rights we take are the obvious ones we need to run the service. For example, the non-exclusive right to host the music you upload, sell it on your behalf (if you choose to enable paid downloads), display whatever lyrics and artwork you publish to the site, and so on. And lastly, I propose this Comment period runs for 1 week starting 12:01 Saturday (you pick the time zone :) ).
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