Did you take a look at the way gittip does this ? You basically donate to a twitter handle and its owner can 'claim' the account whenever they want. No money is actually transferred until the account is claimed. I don't know if it can be applied to artists/bands though.
I was also wondering: is there no transfer fees with paypal ? Don't they make small amounts transfer useless ?
And one last thing: is it not weird for bands/artists to suddenly receive money from people without being informed about the site and all that ?
'the way gittip does this': I naively assumed Gittip was sitting on the money until it was claimed, but charging the moment its claimed is probably better. I'll have to look into it!
'transfer fees with paypal': Yes and yes. I'm currently spending about 8-10 dollars a week divided over 5 artists. So the slice Paypal gets is significant but bearable. This of course isn't ideal and I've been thinking about other ways of doing this. Bitcoin maybe?
'receive money (...) without being informed': I've got this covered! When an artist receives money they also receive an email explaining why they receive it and how many times the listener played their songs.
I worked in the bitcoin space for a while (cofounded an exchange), and this was a proposal that often came up. so awesome to see someone actually building it. Could I convince you to send me an email: Jordanbirn at gmail.com ?
