Archive for the ‘Music Stores’ Category

People’s Music Store Stops Allowing Fans to Create Their Own Music Stores

MusicAlly has reported that the People’s Music Store is heading for closure. The People’s Music Store is a UK startup that lets music fans set up and run their own digital music store. They signed with Universal Music, but that wasnt even enough to save the business.

Co-founder Ged Day has written to users explaining that the store will go offline this Friday. “Unfortunately, [co-founder] Ed and I have made the difficult decision to take our company in a different direction and so have decided to take peoplesmusicstore.com offline,” he writes.

“This is something that has loomed over us for a while now, and I am happy to say that we really did hold on for as long as we could given the circumstances, but it has now reached the point where we must consider alternative routes.”

The idea of turning music fans into actual curators is very interesting and Im sure that this basic idea will lead to a few more startups of this nature in the near future.

Amazon MP3 Store: Major Upgrades are Coming

It has been reported that Amazon MP3 may be upgrading their systems, user interface and more in Q1 2011. Currently Amazon accounts for 7.1% of the entire US music market and their download service accounts for 1.3% of the same market. Amazon is looking to turn things around and really compete with iTunes head on.

Amazon is aiming for a major Q1 relaunch of the MP3 Store’s APIs and web services. They’re asking partners that are building out or planning to launch Amazon MP3 integrations to hold off until this new release is baked.

Another piece of evidence: Amazon is actively hiring for the MP3 Store team. The MP3 Store’s Twitter account has just tweeted a page with over a dozen job openings for both business and engineering positions, including spots for a Web Applications Manager, Client Application Developer, and engineers dedicated to mobile apps for both Android and other partners (some of these openings were listed in the last five months, while others are apparently brand new).

Disclosure: RouteNote is partnered with Amazon.

Spotify Launches Two More Options and Launches in The Netherlands

Spotify launches two new options to use their service: Spotify Unlimited and Spotify Open.

Spotify Unlimited: costs £4.99 a month, and offers unlimited ad-free music – but ONLY on the computer. If users want mobile access, better sound quality, offline access and other premium features, they’ll still have to sign up to the £9.99-a-month Spotify Premium service.

Spotify Open: Spotify Open is a different flavour of the ad-supported free version of Spotify which caps people’s monthly usage. They’ll be able to listen to the service – with ads – for 20 hours a month. People can sign up to Spotify Open without needing an invite. The Spotify Free service isn’t being scrapped – yet – but it will still be invite-only.

“Up until today, new Spotify users have had two options – either subscribe to the full Spotify Premium experience or receive a Spotify Free invite from a friend,” says Spotify CEO Daniel Ek. “Following Spotify’s major upgrade, we wanted to give music fans new ways to enjoy the service. Now everyone who wants a great introduction to Spotify without an invite, or who wants to enjoy unlimited, ad-free music just on their computers, can do so.”

Additionally: Spotify has just launched in the Netherlands today, so make sure you head to the site and get in!

Spotify Updates Platform With New Features

Spotify released a major update to their service today, integrating a massive set of social and functional features, including the ability to linkn your Facebook and Spotify accounts, and the option of using  to play all the music on your computer’s hard drive.

The new features will be available to free and premium subscribers alike; full list after their little introductory video. All of this new functionality makes Spotify an even stronger contender in the battle for dominance in the online music market, which will be put to the test if and when they launch in the US later this year, going up against already established services like MOG, Sirius and Pandora.

Social

• Connect to Facebook: you can connect to Facebook inside of Spotify, instantly adding all your Facebook friends who’ve selected the same feature. Your friends’ profiles will appear in a new ‘People’ sidebar at the right of the screen, with your personal profile at the top.
• Add usernames: you can also add people by typing their Spotify username, should you know it, into the Spotify search field. For example searching ‘spotify:user:username’ will bring up their profile (if their profile is published).
• Publish your Spotify profile to the web: easily publish the link to your Spotify profile on your blog, Facebook page, website or anywhere else on the web and allow others to follow your musical journey. For example here’s a link to the official Spotify profile.
• Inbox: a new ‘inbox’ folder on Spotify’s left sidebar lets you send tracks to friends directly within the platform, simply by dragging and dropping a track to their name in the People sidebar. Alternatively, just right click on the track and select the new ‘send to’ option.
• Facebook feed: music your friends have posted on Facebook will be visible on the Spotify ‘What’s new’ page and via a new ‘Feed’ tab.
• Popularity count for playlists: all playlists will show how many other Spotify users are currently subscribed to that playlist. By clicking on the number, you can even see the usernames of those who added the playlist.
• Track playlist changes: see who and when a track was added to a playlist with the new ‘Added’ and ‘User’ columns in playlists.

Library

• Local files: missing any music in Spotify? Now you can import a link to all the music files stored on your computer with a simple click of a button.
  • Gracenote: As with any good music media player, if you have missing or incorrect track information you need software to check those files and automatically correct them so that you can better organise and link them to our catalogue. Gracenote does just this.
  • Local file linking: we will check your local files and see if we have that track/artist/album in Spotify. If we do, we’ll make the file linkable so you can easily go from that file into an artist or album page. This allows for better sharing of playlists that contain a mix of your own music and Spotify’s.
• Starred: every track and album on Spotify can now be ‘starred’ – allowing you to tag all your favourites into a special sub-folder.
• Wireless sync: you can copy your music files to your mobile without connecting a USB cable with our new wireless sync feature.
• Filter bar: the library has a permanent filter-bar at the top so you can easily type in what you’re searching for. In all other lists the filter bar is visible when pressing cmd-f (mac) or ctrl-f (windows).

Additional features

• Mosaic images for playlists: the artwork from the first nine tracks in a playlist will create a cool mosaic image for your playlist
• New toolbar in headers: Sharing music to Facebook/Twitter and your friends is much simpler. Easy to subscribe or unsubscribe to a playlist as well as view information about how popular a playlist is.
• A share icon in ‘Now playing’ artwork: makes sharing what you’re currently listening to much easier.
• Automatic track replacement: Spotify will now automatically try to find a replacement for any track you can’t play. So if a friend in another country sends you a playlist with tracks you can’t play or a local file, we’ll search our catalogue and link to a playable track when possible. A ‘link’ icon next to the track name represents replaced tracks.

Win a $10,000 Gift Certificate at iTunes

iTunes is heading for it’s 10 billionth track sold, and has launched a promotion to encourage people to get their credit cards out. If you’re the purchaser of the 10,000,000,000th track, then that nice Mr. Jobs will post you a gift card worth $10,000 to spend in the iTunes store. Interestingly, you don’t actually need to buy any music to be eligible to win the ten thousand dollar prize; you can get a free sweepstake entry by filling out a form here, which should count the same as a song purchase if your entry gets processed immediately after the 99,999,999,999th track is sold. You can keep an eye on the track sales ticker on the iTunes homepage, and put in up to 25 free entries a day, or just log in and buy a huge pile of songs near the time. I’ll be entering, but unfortunately they don’t sell hardware on the iTunes store, so my iPad will have to wait until Christmas. Oh, and if you happened to buy from one of the artists that RouteNote has distributed music to iTunes for, then we’d be really pleased.

HP Launches Proprietory Music Service

Hewlett Packard, one of the biggest desktop manufacturers, has announced its plans to operate a music download and streaming supscription service called MusicStation, operated in conjunction with a company called Omnifone and installed by default on all of their new PC’s, desktops and laptops alike. This service looks set to enter the market and compete directly with services like Emusic and Spotify, charging a monthly subscription, variable by territory, but coming in at around $14.50 USD. The service will allow subscribers to stream and listen to as many songs as they like, and keep 10 DRM free downloads forever, even after they cancel their subscription.

The User Interface will have to be good to justify the premuim over Spotify’s sub price, although the ability to keep downloads is an incentive. The service seems a sort of halfway house between the bigger success stories of the nascent digital music market, iTunes, Emusic, Spotify… Even though it’s not a particularly innovative product, HP have a similar advantage in that they can build hardware that interfaces smoothly with their software, and get their product in the hands of anyone who buys their machines, just as Apple do with their desktops. That said, Microsoft’s Zune failed to make the impact they’d hoped, despite the fact that it had some nice functional advantages over the iPod and their software runs on the vast majority of PC’s worldwide. Given the facility with which software can be obtained, I think HP’s project will live or die by the quality of its interface, and keeping up with Spotify on that front will be a hard task.

Digital Music Distributors Compared (again)

It’s been a while since we last ran through the comparison between our digital distribution service and those of our competitors. Let’s open with a table looking at the USD$ price of signing up various types of release to a few of the major digital distributors out there on the net, which we’ll follow with links to the information pages from which these figures were derived, and a brief look at the pros and cons of each service. [A UPC is a barcode, necessary for most online stores to identify your release as a unique product.]

CD Baby – First thing to note is that signing up to CD Baby’s digital service means you also have to sign up to their physical program, and send them at least 5 physical CD’s (click and see step 2 of this page). [You can get physical distribution through RouteNote via Amazon's on demand service] On top of the signup fee, you’ll also need to pay them $20 to set up a UPC for you [we do this for free], then they’ll take 9% of the revenue that comes back from their online retail partners [slightly less than our 10%, but we're not charging you any upfront fees]. Their signup fee is a flat, per release deal, although they say that single pricing is “coming soon”.

DigitalMusicDistribution.co.uk (DMD) – This deal information document makes us feel very nervous. The company doesn’t seem to have seen fit to run their deal memo through a spellchecker, so it seems unlikely they will have run it past a lawyer. Their flat fee service involves you paying £100 [!] upfront for a 6 month release, after which your music will be removed from any services they uploaded it to, so our table has them in for double to make up the year. It gets even more worrying – they ask that you send the money directly to them by PayPal with a payment tag attached explaining what you want to buy from them, and then they’ll contact you… I’m sure you can email them first and open a dialogue, but I’d need some pretty serious assurance that my money was safe before I sent it. This can’t ever be an issue with us, as money only ever flows one way. From us, to you.

Emubands – UK based, with a flat fee up front model, their lack of an annual subscription fee makes them the most efficient of our competitors, but their admin process is offline; meaning you have to send them a CD and a cheque and co-ordinate the upload and distribution remotely. With us, you can do it all from your computer, and monitor your release, your sales data, and what payments are owed at any time. You’d also have to make more than $1,400 worth of sales through iTunes before you had spent the equivalent of an album’s sign up fee with Emubands on our back end percentage (a dollar on iTunes means about 58c in your pocket with us).

Musicadium – Musicadium have a flat fee system, outlined in this document [pg.4] and based on how many stores you want your music to end up in, rather than how many tracks your release is. You have to pay Aussie sales tax on their fees, which you can claim back from the Australian government if you send them the receipt, and they have a AUD$20 annual renewal fee on top of this, if you want to stay with them after the 1st year.

RouteNote – This is us. We don’t charge you anything for uploading, subscription, hosting or anything else. We just take a straightforward 10% from the retail revenue of your tracks. This means that we want you to succeed, and we don’t ask you to pay us for the privilege of being a part of your success. If you’re selling millions of dollars worth of music, then you aren’t going to sign up with us, as the 10% gets big, but then, you’re probably signed to one of the big 4 anyway, and things get a lot more complicated in that case. We’re here for independent artists looking to self-release music without having to cross someone’s palm with silver to get their music up online – hopefully this is you!

The Gene Pool – Charge exactly the same back end rate as we do, but with an added fee on top, and distributing to less stores. This should be an easy decision for you to make.

Tunecore – They have headline package prices for singles and albums, but once you start getting into the nitty gritty of their pricing, things get a bit more expensive. The numbers above are based on their $0.99 per upload per track to a release, and then $0.99 per online store you want that release to go into. They also make a $19.98 a year maintenance charge per release, so your costs can start adding up once you’ve got a few different releases online.

A lot of these stores cry up the huge number of retail partners that they’ve got, but a lot of these are duplications, counting the iTunes stores in different territories as separate entities, that kind of thing. We try and keep it simpler than that, deal with the major retailers, and only count them all once. It is important to keep in mind just how small a share of the market the minority stores have; iTunes represented about 88% of the American market way back in ’06 and has been growing since; we’ve done more analysis of their market share in this previous post. This means that once you get past the top 3 retailers, the additional revenue streams from the rest of the market are comparatively very small.

There are a few other distribution houses out there that don’t deign to put their deals out on the net for people to see – if you’ve got experience of working with The Orchard, Ingrooves, IODA or anyone else and would like to contribute to this discussion, please comment and let us know what you think of their services. You can also check out our previous post comparing digital distribution services that goes through some different scenarios to this one – read it by clicking here.

[EDIT: - I neglected to mention Zimbalam, another of our competitors based in France. They have a slightly bigger store list than us, take the same back end percentage (10%) and charge a £20 fee for singles, £30 for albums)]

Myspace to acquire imeem – what fate for 16 million users?

Ailing social giant Myspace is in acquisitive mood. Having just purchased iLike (the same service that just did the music search deal with Google), they’re now in talks to make a deal to buy imeem, the music streaming service that bought SNOCAP, and that is reported to have around 16 million users. Currently imeem is suffering the same difficulties as other free music streaming services like Spotify – balancing the ad income they receive against the licensing and bandwidth costs of streaming tracks.

This deal would provide Myspace with some fresh blood in it’s music department, along with some experience in solving the problems of a high-traffic music streaming service – something which they’re looking hard for at the moment, as a Myspace Music that has to be paid for will inevitably lose a lot of traffic. They’ll also be losing their Google ad revenue, unless they renegotiate the deal, and with dropping traffic and dropping revenue, they are going to have to innovate or die. The deal isn’t closed yet, and there’s been no indication of how the sites and services might be integrated. Rest assured, if it starts looking profitable, we’ll strike a deal to distribute music to them so you don’t miss out.

Click here to read TechCrunch’s article about the acquisition.

Dr. Dre, Monster and Best Buy buck the Digital Trend

At a time when digital music sales are fast overtaking physical as the medium of choice for consumers, and the most valuable sector of the international music market, traditional physical retailers are looking for ways to enchance the high street (US = Mall) experience. Best Buy have launched a new ‘destination’ music section instore in partnership with cable, audio and accessory manufacturer Monster and Dr. Dre (in corporate guise) called Club Beats. Whether the rap star’s endorsement of this window dressing will have any real effect on sales is dubious, but it does mean that the lugubrious dinosaur that is the US retail market has finally noticed that someone has kicked it’s tail and is trying to overcome it’s inertia. In any case, the Club Beats section will provide a lovely, distributed physical platform to launch the Dr.’s new album ‘Detox’ if and when it finally reaches shelves (release is scheduled for 2010). Just don’t spill your soda on any of the records while you’re in there…

Blue Beat being Sued for Streaming Beatles Music for Free

Given how fiercely the Beatles’ back catalogue is resisting full online availability (they’re still not on iTunes), I can’t understand how Blue Beat thought it could possibly be a good idea to offer free streaming on their back catalogue. Inevitably, they’re being sued to remove it, but haven’t yet (3pm Nov 5th) removed it from their site. I wouldn’t like to be looking down the barrel of EMI’s revolver on this one.