Viva la revolution?

BitTorrent + Donations = Viva la revolution? is an interesting question on Ask Metafilter about providing a service that makes it easy to share music and donate to the artists (which I was actually just talking to someone about the other day.) Metafilter user scarabic suggested that the Internet doesn't need any help with the trading but to stick to the  facilitating donations aspect. Which made my wheels turn and I posted this:

The idea is decent but I think scarabic might be right. Why not find a way to hook donations into all the trading activity that's going on right now?

It would be interesting if someone would build a verified directory of where to donate money to artists. Have an open API so torrent trackers and other music trading sites could implement it as a feel-good gesture.

That way if someone's on some torrent tracker and is grabbing my album they could have a little link that says "Hey, like the album? Click here to donate to the artist."

I think that'd be neat and have the potential to catch on and also potentially put a nice spin on all the trading that's going on if it were to actually work in artists' benefit.

Not sure if it's actually doable though. If a big paypal directory's not possible, you could turn yourself into a collection agency, hold and distribute the money or something. (Then turn evil and crook all the musicians out of their cash of course.)

I haven't thought much about the technical aspects of it but I think it's an interesting idea.