SONG CONTEST BLOG

Kyte, the San Francisco based company providing turn-key solutions for online and mobile digital content production, distribution and monetization, has announced the launch of custom iPhone and iPod Touch apps as a new means for music fans to access their favourite artists’ music, videos, news, and exclusive content.  In a separate affair, 90’s rock group, Presidents of the United States of America, who made a name for themselves with “Lump” and “Peaches”, have just released their own iPhone app along the same lines.  For $2.99, fans can stream the band’s entire catalogue over a Wi-Fi or cellular connection, as well as gain access to exclusive content and previously unreleased music.  This is exciting music industry news!  iPhone apps are hugely popular and provide an unparalleled platform for artists to access their audience and visa versa.  It won’t be long before we see more and more artists, from megstars to indies, harnessing this technology to promote themselves, monetize their catalogue, and upsell associated initiatives and assets such as concert tickets and merchandise.

Ad-supported music service, Qtrax, hopes to differentiate itself by offering downloads previously only available as bootlegs.  This move may position the company atop of 25 million tracks under this category alone, assuming that that copyright clearance hurdles can be overcome.  In the mean time, Peter Gabriel’s competing ad-supported music service, We7, has announced a partnership with NME.com.  The strategy is geared toward increasing the value of advertising real estate by diverting traffic to the popular British indie music zine which is likely to improve the combined user time spent online and, resultantly, drive more ad revenue.  The two music services have been in the works for some time now and have faced great difficulty in both securing all the major catalogues and financing their operations through advertising alone, a model that will meet further challenges during the present economic downturn when advertisers are being particularly frugal.

Nashville-based finger-picking singer/songwriter, Chris Volpe, wins Round 4 of the 2008 Lyric Writer Awards.  This is not Volpe’s first success story with We Are Listening.  In 2006, he won The Singer/Songwriter Awards song contest and spent a weekend with us in London recording his selected song, “Shoes”, at Sphere Studios in South London with Producer, Steve Williams.  “Shipwrecked”, Volpe’s debut studio album, will be in hand within a week and slated for distribution shortly after.

DiscRevolt provides an esthetically pleasing physical solution for the digital delivery of music media. Like DropCards, DiscRevolt is music-centric and caters to the artist’s need to promote on the field (street, venue, what have you…) with a product that’s a cross between a flyer and a CD (or perhaps an alternative to a branded USB Wristband?).  The company prints the artist’s artwork on a double-sided plastic card and includes a custom code for the receiver to redeem digital music media from the DiscRevolt storefront.  At $90 per 100 prints, it’s a little cheaper than manufacturing CDs and its wallet sized for convenience.  It looks smart and can be sold or given away.  Downloads are tracked and available through DiscRevolt’s social network applications on MySpace and Facebook.  See MusicPin also, a competing solution which showcased at Midem 2009.

In a post called “Don’t Confuse Technology with Marketing” published today on The Music Snob, I found the opening statement intriguing: “The use of music marketing technology is not in and of itself an act of music marketing.”  The post develops into an insightful, artist’s perspective on the plethora of web-based music marketing and networking solutions aimed at independent artists and promoters, and questions their claim – each service with its unique proposition – as “an act of marketing” by mere subscription to and execution of their service. The Music Snob highlights that the majority of these services provide a means for fans to find the artist and not visa versa.  For instance, if the artist is distributing his music to iTunes, he is certainly making his music available for purchase… but that’s not marketing, that’s plain old supply.  So how do you create demand?  By marketing.

One of the successful attributes of social networks is the balance of push and pull marketing.  In push marketing, you look for and find friends.  In pull marketing, friends look for and find you.  Popular folks enjoy more of the pull while the less socially apt have to push.  This is a tried and tested socio-ecosystem, online and off.  However, musicians and music listeners are, by definition, unequal.  There may be a cross over – musicians may also listen to and purchase music and music listeners may also write songs and play in band – but one is supplying and the other is consuming.  In a world where music is ubiquitous and available in limitless varieties, the marketplace is not in favour of the musician and, therefore,  he must actively market (push and push hard) to find music listeners to consume his music.  The advent of taste making music technology such as Pandora, iLike and Last.fm has made it easier for musicians to develop their presence online but that, I hope The Snob will agree, is far too passive to constitute a true marketing effort through technology which, first and foremost, caters to the consumer’s appetite for music (and not necessarily your music).

From my understanding, what this post suggests, at least in part, is that few artists manage to market themselves successfully, even with an array of revolutionary “marketing” tools, and, resultantly, the music industry’s bottom line pretty much remains the same: a handful of artists sell while the vast majority don’t, even if all of them have a presence on MySpace, Facebook, ReverbNation, Sellaband, OurStage, Music Nation, Sonicbids etc. etc.

Starting at approximately $1000, emusu provides a turn-key solution for managing and selling your digital assets from your own domain, as opposed to distributing to third-party ecommerce websites or via social network applications.  The system is entirely web-based and the company is sinking its teeth into the music industry.  Ouch. 

The service allows its customers to create custom web pages from a series of handy templates and enable fans to buy directly from the source or incorporate its technology into an existing site geared for music retail.

The fact is that most artists simply don’t sell.  In fact, most labels don’t sell a volume of any note.  As such, even if the service was free, managing your own music sales is not too far up your priority list unless you’re shifting so many units that iTunes’ commission significantly diminishes your bottom line.  Furthermore, if MySpace, boasting approximately three million *active* musician users can’t make Snocap work on exclusive terms, how is emusu going to convince prospective clients that they can sell – and sell more – on their own?

At a time where the industry is shifting away from record sales and toward ticketing, merchandising, bundling, licensing, sponsorship, and advertising, emusu is a surprising entry into the space.  Selling recorded music is no longer the end game but rather the marketing collateral to sell something else.  The infamous 360 deal is a tribute to this strategy and Live Nation is a testament to its success.  Starbucks too.

However, if emusu can leverage its platform to forward thinking megastars such as Radiohead or Nine Inch Nails, both of which ’sold’ direct-to-the-fan, they may have a lucrative client.  Or two.

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.

TuneCore, the do-it-yourself digital music distribution platform, landed $7 million in a recent round led by Opus Capital. The company offers immediate access into stores like iTunes, and poses serious competition to existing indie distribution companies like CD Baby.

Artists can distribute their albums or individual tracks across a number of digital music stores for under $30, and keep the royalties, a model that has yet to be tried and tested by the major digital distributors on behalf of long tail clients.

TuneCore, a digital music distribution company with a front door, fixed fee revenue model, may have conceived of the very solution independent artists have been seeking to get their digital tracks on major, online music outlets. Unsigned artists often rely on CD Baby for digital music distribution as they specifically cater to individual, burgeoning artists. More established artists and labels turn their catalogues over to the major digital distributors including The Orchard, IODA, IRIS and INgrooves. Without exception, digital distributors have been servicing their clients’ catalogue for a percentage of the proceeds paid to them from the retailers (i.e. iTune, Napster, Rhapsody) and pay the artist or label the remainder in monthly or quarterly intervals. 20% to 30% from the top, depending on who you are and the size of your catalogue is a standard distributor cut.

TuneCore, in contrast, charges its artist and label clientele upfront: 99 cents per song and 99 cents per store for each album and an annual $9.98 charge per album, instead of dipping into any backend percentage of proceeds due to the artist or label from downloads. It’s a simple and rather refreshing plan – certainly affordable – and, in my mind, challenges the services that the other distributors are offering. More importantly, it promises individual artists with a low profile and small or fledgling labels to access all the necessary portals for MP3 retail.

Online music will arguably be the fastest moving and consistently evolving industries in 2007. Previously undiscovered artists will come to the fore via high-traffic tastemaker blogs such as Stereogum, innovative retail platforms such as Amie St. and the ease and availability of content distribution. The traditionally reluctant giants of music, such as Universal and EMI, have already embraced the idea of becoming more than a ‘record company’ by providing their large catalogues to a variety of digital platforms and, I expect, will re-brand themselves as leading digital purveyors rather than the illegal file-sharing ‘arm of the law’.

With the much anticipated advertising-driven download services such as SpiralFrog, Napster and eMusic lending themselves to mobile networks such as Cingular and TicketMaster’s $13.5m investment in iLike (founders of Garageband), the music space will become, quite literally, universal. More artists are likely to show up on the radar due to, say, an unexpected public vote on a music community such as PureVolume or a great show at a festival sponsored by the renowned artist service, Sonicbids. By the end of the year, I believe that the increase of independent music communities and number of online artist profiles will pave the way to greater choice, more accurate recommendations to consumers and more alternatives to expose previously unheard-of music.

And while all of these multi-million dollar start-ups promise more exposure and business for unsigned artists and a better experience for music lovers, as musicians, we can still depend on good ‘ol fashioned live venues – another sector on the up & up. T-shirt anyone?