SONG CONTEST BLOG

1. Follow Terry McBride
CEO and Co-Founder of Nettwerk Music Group
Terry McBride is a two-time recipient of the Pollstar Industry Award for Personal Manager of the Year for his work with Sarah McLachlan (1997) and Avril Lavigne/Coldplay (2002), and recipient of the Walt Grealis Special Achievement Award at the 2003 Juno Awards, recognizing an outstanding individual who has contributed to the growth and advancement of the Canadian music industry.

2. Follow Derek Sivers
Founder and former President of CD Baby
Winner of the 2003 World Technology Award, Derek Sivers founded CD Baby “by accident” in 1998 and turned it into the largest seller of independent music on the web, which he sold a decade later to Disc Makers.

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Bruce Houghton, founder of Skyline Music, an artist booking agency, and author of leading Music Industry blog, Hypebot, makes his voice heard on the CD Baby DIY Musician Podcast.  Listen to it here.

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Duncan Freeman of Indie Music Tech uncovered an interesting startup over the weekend.  Smirp, in spite of its long-winded and confusing ‘how it works’ page, is a remarkably simple and practical service, allowing artists and music promoters to sell their MP3s at a customer-determined price point directly via email.  The set-up is brilliant: use your existing Google, Yahoo or other OpenID username and password to log in instantly, link your account to your Amazon account, upload your content to your Smirp ‘name-your-own-price’ page (example), and promote this page by embedding Smirp buttons on your website or social network profiles.  Your customers will click, enter their email, name their own price (or select the minimum price you establish) and receive a link to download your MP3s via email with a 12 hour lifetime [for security reasons].  At face value, it’s similar to Twitpay, the Twitter-dedicated payment solution.

Smirp’s two-tier pricing is more than fair: $6/month for unlimited use or Free in exchange for 20% of your proceeds.  On concept, inspired by Radiohead’s In Rainbows campaign, and ease-of-use alone, this is one of the hottest digital music distribution solutions I have come across.  Perhaps an alliance with CreateSpace, Amazon’s flexible print-per-order CD distribution service will position Smirp alongside the current indie titans, namely ReverbNation, CD Baby and TuneCore?

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By distributing your music through Amazon’s CreateSpace, you can sell both your digital downloads and CDs on Amazon without ever having to finance and ship-in your physical stock.  Simply upload your digital assets (i.e mp3s, album artwork, discface graphics) and CreateSpace will set you up with a store, make your mp3s available for download, and print CD’s and ship them to your customers on demand.  Although Amazon’s commission for this service is high, duplicating CDs per pre-paid order may save you a tidy sum in the long run.

TuneCore recently partnered with CreateSpace which adds a much needed physical dimension to its one-stop, fixed-price digital distribution service.  CD Baby already offers physical and digital distribution and, since its acquisition by Discmakers, can fulfill the printing process too.  How will ReverbNation respond?

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Music discovery and playlist service, Grooveshark, was selected as one of ten winners in CNET’s 2009 Webware 100 in the “Audio & Music” category, sharing the spotlight with the formidable usual suspects including iTunes, AmazonMP3, and Pandora.  This is indeed a privilege for the Floridian upstart which triumphed over CD Baby, iLike, Sellaband, Jango, and other well publicized and funded music dotcoms.  Nearly 630,000 votes were cast this year.

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Discmakers, the CD replication giant that recently acquired CD Baby, announced the launch of a new promotion yesterday for independent artists.  The company’s CD and packaging artwork division, The Design Studio, is providing customers that place design orders by the 10th April 2009 with a chance to appear front and center on their print brochure.  During the eight week campaign, a panel of professional graphic designers will select 10 CD album artowkr designs from that week’s “pool of design approvals”.  On the 20th April 2009, one Grand Prize Winner will be selected for placement on the brochure’s front cover, along with five other selections to appear inside the fall edition.  Details…

Successful digital music distribution is, first and foremost, gauged by how cheaply and swiftly you can get your music on iTunes and whether your distributor can offer any marketing support, usually reserved for major label clients or independent megastars.  Although the current leaders, namely The Orchard, IRIS and IODA, now cater to the long-tail musician community, independent artists (a huge market) are being catered to by new, easy-to-digest digital music distribution models that appear to surpass the existing competition.  CD Baby, for instance, the most renowned online CD retailer of independent artists, has leveraged its resources for its target demographic and, resultantly, enjoying exponential growth in the digital music distribution sector.  With no start-up costs and just a 9% commission, the indie retailer is an excellent choice for up and coming artists.  A relatively new entry in the space, TuneCore, is making a splash with an equally unbeatable offer: $0.99 per track, $0.99 per store per album, and $19.98 per album per year storage or, $9.99 flat per song, all-inclusive.  No commission.

Due to sinking CD sales, digital music distribution has become the primary means of placing new music in front of consumers in a variety of online mediums.  As the retail options for independent artists increase, so does the value proposition from the digital music distribution service providers.

Surprisingly, the world’s most renowned indie artist retailer is experiencing growth in CD sales, of all sectors.  CD Baby, founded by Derek Sivers and recently acquired by Discmakers for $22 million, has reported significant uplifts in recent physical sales and titles: 2% increase in CD sales, and 7% increase in new album titles since 2007.  That’s good news but, more significantly, the company boasts a 45% increase in digital music distribution revenues during the same period which is a better reflection of where the music industry is at.  Overall, CD Baby has paid out $34 million to its artist members in 2008, a 28% increase from 2007.  Although these figures reflect the company’s revenue growth as opposed to the mean earnings of its members, considering the current financial climate, it’s promising data for the indie artists community too.