SONG CONTEST BLOG

Yesterday, ReverbNation announced their partnership with Audiolife and the soft launch of the Reverb Store, a robust and fully-integrated e-commerce solution for artists and agents to sell directly to their fanbase.  From do-it-yourself T-shirt designs to comprehensive earning reports, the Reverb Store is as turn-key as the ReverbNation ethos.  Best of all, it includes all the social media promotional widgets and collateral you would expect as well as seamless integration with ReverbNation’s existing marketing features.  Anyone can open a store, create as many custom items as they want, and operate the store for free.  No monthly minimums, no monthly fees.

“The Reverb Store allows artists to layer a purchasing opportunity into every fan interaction they have online, whether it’s at Facebook, MySpace, a blog, or the band’s own website.”
– Michael Doernberg, CEO of ReverbNation

“Artists need solutions that can help them grow their fan base and convert those fans into customers.  The Reverb Store is the total package, combining the best of ReverbNation and Audiolife.”
– Brandon Hance, Founder and CEO of Audiolife

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MTV is leveraging its massively successful Rock Band game to independent artists by introducing Rock Band Network, Rock Band’s own music catalogue and store which budding and established musicians can submit their material for review by Rock Band’s music supervisors.  Artists will have total control over the music they submit, from mixing and editing for game related uses to pricing individual tracks for retail.  It’s a potentially incredible opportunity to publish and market your music to a very large, loyal and highly-targeted music-loving demographic.

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Pandora, the revolutionary streaming music and tastemaker service, and one of the most disruptive promotional platforms for musicians of every style and caliber, has imposed new rules for submission of music to its playlist database by artists and labels.  In the past, Pandora accepted music in almost any form at no cost.  Now, artists and labels must have a CD of their music, a unique UPC code for that CD (for vendors to keep track of inventory), and it must be available for purchase on Amazon, rules that most artists and labels already comply with.  However, some indies are not yet on Amazon.  In order to meet Pandora’s new criteria, artists and labels will need to obtain a unique UPC code for the physical album they wish promote prior to joining the Amazon Advantage Program at a cost of $29.95/yr, per Pandora’s recommendation, to make it available for sale.  These new measures will standardize the album artwork spec Pandora displays on its playlists, pulling all the images directly from Amazon, and linking every playable track to the Amazon store.  Amazon takes a 55% commission from sales from which it pays Pandora a share for referrals.  Considering that the Net proceeds of six or seven CDs annually will cover the cost of the Amazon Advantage Program plus the fee for the UPC code, I reckon that any artist worth hearing will be only too happy to oblige.

If you don’t already have a UPC code, you can get one here or through any number of musician resources such as CD Baby, Discmakers, and Nimbit.  Check out Pandora’s submission FAQ and Amazon Advantage Program for application details.

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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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Twitpay.me, as the name suggests, is a service for sending payments via Twitter.  Twitpay makes a note of a “promise” to make payment (which can be cancelled at anytime) and allows the payer to settle the payment using Amazon Payments.  The honour system is in play here to a certain extent but, as a payment instruction on Twitter is as public as any other Twitter update, the payer will look like a schmuck (or Twit, if you’re British) to his followers if he doesn’t pay-up.

The company has leveraged Twitpay for a bare-bones retail and distribution system for content copyright holders (e.g. musicians and music promoters).  Using Retweet Commerce Suite (or RT2Buy), artists and their agents can upload and store their music on Twitpay and tell their followers about it.  Twitpay provides track samples, monitors “promises” to purchase, and delivers the content.  The promotion may look something like this:

Just finished a new track “Get Your Rocks Off” available now for only 99c RT2Buy http://rt2b.me/232xe

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LoudFeed made its introduction on Hypebot yesterday as yet another website and widget creation service for artists.  In terms of features, LoudFeed appears to be competing directly with Nimbit, which currently provides a more complete and competitive solution in my opinion.   Although there are a number of distinct advantages to managing your own sales and distribution hub, I’m still not convinced that you can’t get everything you need from Word Press, along with ecommerce plugins, and a super SEO-friendly architecture, for free.  Check out WPBest.com for premium themes and WP-Cumulus for a cool dynamic Tag Cloud.  TDMhosting will host your Word Press site for $4.99.  Bargain.

MusicWeek reported that ad-supported music service and download store, We7, which Peter Gabriel co-founded, is rolling out a new monetization model whereby its users get rewarded with points for their session time which can be redeemed for ad-free days of music.  In addition, an ad-free subscription service will be offered as the portal’s premium tier.  The news comes just shy of SpiralFrog’s announcement last month that it will be shutting down.  SpiralFrog, a competing ad-supported music service, was unable to sustain its business model.

On demand music streaming service, Spotify, has been on my radar since the company announced a distribution deal with CD Baby in the first week of February.  CD Baby, the leading force in independent music retail and digital music distribution, represents more than 175,000 artists which account for over one million tracks, all of which are now available through Spotify’s lightweight music streaming application.  This licensing deal marks the ‘long-tail’ trend in music availability and consumption, and celebrates the access independent artists have today to mass audiences through pioneering music services, many of which had treated indie talent as nothing more than an afterthought after securing major label catalogues.  Under the aphorism of “access not ownership”, the Luxemburg-based company has been growing exponentially since its €15.3m venture capital injection in October 2008 and, in turn, joining an elite group of legal music experience providers such as Pandora, Last.fm, TheSixtyOne, and others, which have found success in catering to music consumers through a balanced and worldly music library whilst reserving significant real-estate for up and coming artists: a pop-culture and grassroots music mix that appears to be paving the way for a new industry.  A spot in Spotify’s limelight is not yet available directly for small acts and labels but CD Baby has certainly lowered the barrier of entry.  Thank you Derek or, rather, Disc Makers for making this possible…

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