Archive for the ‘Press’ Category
Last.fm is to takeover four HD radio stations off CBS in the US including, New York, LA, Chicago and San Francisco. All stations will have the same play-list, which will be determined by the outcome of the weekly charts according to the last.fm website, to feature a mix of music aggregated and influenced by the service’s user-generated weekly charts. Twinned with performances and interviews from its new New York studios. The new station will also be accessable through the website, as well as the already established CBS radio. Which is good news for fans across the pond as the new HD radio stations will only be accessible to HD radio receivers in the new areas: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and San Francisco.
The broadcast will begin on October 5th, and as well as being able to find it through the named sites it will be available through the relevant related apps through iPhone, iPod Touch and some Blackberries.
Disclosure: RouteNote is a partnered with Last.fm
Starting up a band is relatively easy. Four mates that all wanna be rock stars, can all play reasonably, right some songs that you all think are the nuts (or learn covers that make money) and find a place to practice. Most starting up bands though all have jobs that help them fund their obsession with the latest release from Gibson or whoever you adore. That’s just the problem though, working men in Indy (or whatever your music scene thing is) bands don’t have the time to promote themselves. Its just not realistic to be a super mum and plug your band at the same time. So what precious time they do have needs to count. Here are three easy steps from RouteNote.com that should make it easier. And I hope that RouteNote.com subscribers are all reading this! (if not, shame on you!)
- Gigs. The bottom line for a band is playing in front of people. There is no point in rocking out and singing about saving the universe if you’ve got on-one to listen. Open mic nights are good place to start if you can make it. Offer to play every week with the establishment, so there is always someone there at least, they’ll appreciate that and you’ll find yourself in a semi-house band situation. You’ll end up playing with other people too and eventually creating a name for yourself in the local community.
- Social Networking. Social network yourself like crazy. Make friends with every band that slaps themselves on Myspace or Facebook and they’ll make friends with you right back. Even if they make a thousand empty promises to go to your gigs, they’ll still know your name an recognise it if they see it on a poster or their friends tell them about you. Try to go to as many of their gigs as possible. You’ll not only be able to create some more contacts and friends along the way, but it will encourage them to go to yours. More people at your gigs means things are improving already. You can then start to plug your social network site and contacts to your fans.
- Contacts and Circles. Semi-contradictory to the second one, don’t follow everyone else at once, sometimes its nice to be missed. Spend most of your social Network time (when you go out i mean not in front of the PC) at a lot of the same places. Follow local promoters that you think have a genuine interest in your band and follow bands that you want to work with. You’ll start to become a regular and will become synonymous with the music scene. It should result in you becoming “that guy” people think of if they need an amp or whatever. They’ll start to ring you and offer you gigs, soon after that the band should start to look after itself.
Superior court judge Mitchell Beckloff has approved a three way deal between Micheal Jackson’s estate, tour/concert promoters AEG live and Columbia Pictures who are interested in making a movie of the pop stars final rehearsals.
The project, that was given a thumbs on 7th August, will be a collaboration of hundreds of hour the singers backstage rehearsals for venues in Los-Angeles and some footage of his preparations for what was intended to be his 50 date London comeback tour.
Columbia have announced that the film is scheduled to be released on 30th October and have forked out $6o million for the rights for the film. Some of the film will reportedly be in 3D, well, lets hope in doesn’t turn into another moon-walker!
This morning we got sent a great link from one of our artists about a glowing review of our service. Here at RouteNote we are always trying to improve our service and provide artists what they want. If anyone ever has any suggestions on what you want to see on our service then please get in touch and let us know.
Getting Your Music onto iTunes: full article
RouteNote is a cut above the rest in about every aspect of the game.
RecordProduction.com is a site built for and by producers. There’s a punt-load of video interviews with famous and well respected music producers, plus video and photo tours of their studios. If you want to know how your producing idol went about getting a particular sound, or worked on a particular song, or just to sneak a look at what bits of kit they’ve got in their studio, it’s worth browsing the videos to see if they’re there. There are loads of links to production job finding sites, tips and reviews on equipmen, plus good places to buy it. There’s also a forum where jobs and kit are posted and a load of other like-minded people to kick your music production ideas around with, and ask about music distribution, marketing, tech stuff etc. Go watch some videos and recommend us around!
Some news that might not seem immediately edifying, but might have far reaching implications. The Intellectual Property Office in the UK has issued a ‘Scoping Document‘ attempting to assess the potential role of a Digital Rights Agency. Given what’s currently happening between the PRS and Google, the rights of artists to benefit from the exploitation of their music online is quite a hot topic at the moment.
More rumblings in the same region of the law are sounding in New Zealand, where Google has deposited it’s two cents in a discussion being held by the Telecommunication Carrier’s Forum – a think-tank organised by the TeleComms and ISP comapnies in that region to decide how to monitor and deal with digital copyright violations. Google has come in on the side of the consumer, saying that the idea of banning users who are caught infringing three times from using the ISP’s services – in effect cutting them off access to the internet as a whole – was too heavy a penalty. They also chime in with approval of measures designed to protect ISP’s from the consequences of copyright infringement perpetrated by their customers. Google is in a pretty unique position to provide a balanced opinion, given that they are operating a service across every nation in the world, but their ultimate position is always going to be pro-internet and pro-traffic of information, including music, because that is essentially pro-Google. More pageviews, more ad revenue.
How then, to deal with copyright violation on the net? The RIAA is abandoning it’s programme of coming down heavy on individuals in the hope that it will act as a deterrent to other pirates, as sending threatening letters and scaring little old ladies seems to be generating more negative publicity for them than deterrent effect on the pirates. Perhaps prosecuting people like middle-aged Mavis from New Hampshire in their fearful absence is not quite the shining moralistic proof that pinching a devious little ferret of a computer scientist with a server-filled basement of porn and Michael Jackson albums might be, but then he’d have used proxies and covered his tracks, and would be much harder to catch.
Ultimately this blogger just hopes all the legislation and discussion and arguing and imprisoning of housewives helps us home in on the inevitable. It is inevitable that consumers on the net will find a way of quickly and conveniently getting hold of the music they want, through filesharing, paid downloads, ad supported models or whatever other method they can. It is inevitable that artists must profit from the consumption of their music, directly or indirectly, because otherwise they won’t be able to afford to make music, and we’ll all have to listen to U2 and the Beatles for evermore, and no-one wants that… So we must, eventually, inevitably arrive at a solution that bridges that gap; that provides a way for music consumers to get what they want cheaply, quickly and conveniently, and for artists to profit from it. Some sort of commercial, digital radio… I’m going to go and listen to Spotify while I think about what that perfect solution might be.
We’re aware of the fact that we’re a small company compared to some of our competitors, but our cost to bands is also smaller than most of them. All of our major competitors make a charge for either uploading or hosting your tracks, subscription fees, renewal fees, charges for ISRC codes, different charges based on how many outlets you want your music to appear in, the ways they find of hiding new charges are as innovative as they are various.
We don’t charge you anything until you start making money. Uploading is free, hosting is free, picking different stores is free, in fact everything is free until you sell your first track, at which point we’ll take 10% of the revenue that comes back. You get to keep 90% of everything we make by working together. Ours isn’t the lowest percentage rate in the market: CDbaby offer 91% to their clients, but their upfront charges mean that not only do you have to get your credit card out of your wallet and pay them before you can hope to see any return from selling your music, but you’re also worse off with them than us until you sell more than ten thousand units. The same is true of Tunecore and Musicadium, and the Orchard never get close, as they take 30% of sales revenue for themselves AND charge you $90 up front.
Here’s a little table showing what you’d pay up front to distribute 2 albums over two years through some of the big distro sites (Musicadium deal in AUD, which I’ve converted at today’s rate of 1.549 to the USD).
And here’s another detailing the income you’d get from various levels of sales, again based on distributing 2 albums over 2 years to all the stores RouteNote deals with, with an average per track income of $0.65, which is what you get back from iTunes.
As you get up to the 5k mark, Tunecore begin to pull ahead, it’s all pretty even around 10,000 and there are undeniable differences in the revenue earned when you get up towards to 30k sales mark, but we’re cheaper all the way up there, and the money will only ever flow one way – to you – if you deal with us.
So why are we better than our competitors? For artists starting out on their own, who want to be in control of their own destinies until they can prove the worth of their music, who don’t want to spend up-front money, and who aren’t realistically looking for sales of thirty thousand records in the first year or two, we are cheaper, quicker and much more interested in the success of our artists, because we’re smaller and our own success is that much more closely linked to that of our musical partners (read some of our testimonials!).
We had a response from Musicadium about this post – querying the way we’d worked out the fees mentioned. Here’s how it works out, based on the figures here in their agreement:
2 x upload fee to more than 3 stores = 2 x $99 = $198
2 x barcode (UPC) generation = 2 x $39 = $78
2 x annual renewal fee = 2 x $20 = $40
198 + 78 + 40 = 316
$316AUD / 1.549 = $204.00USD
Although the exchange rate has probably changed by now…
Here at RouteNote we were lucky enough to get some great press over the weekend from Digital Noise. Digital Noise is a digital music news site from CNet (owners of Download.com, TV.com and more).
CD Baby and Tunecore already offer digital distribution through iTunes and other stores, but both of them charge you money whether you make a sale or not. In contrast, U.K.-based RouteNote charges you nothing until you make a sale, at which point they take a 10 percent cut of whatever the store pays out.
Specifics: CDBaby charges you a one-time set-up fee of $35 (which covers setting up a store for physical CDs as well), then takes 9 percent of digital download revenues. TuneCore, which does digital distribution only (no CDs) charges you $20 a year for each album they stock, but takes no cut. So on a straight numbers basis, RouteNote’s a better deal than CD Baby for digital-only distribution, and a better deal than TuneCore if you expect to sell low volumes of downloads. Of course, there are a lot of other factors to consider, like customer service and speed of submission to iTunes and the other stores, but RouteNote looks like it’s worth checking out.
You can check out the full article here.
A lot of people get in touch with us to ask how many digital stores we distribute music to, and what proportion of the digital music market they represent. We also hear comments on the relatively small number of people we deal with in comparison to the huge lists of partners at some of our competitors, e.g. CDbaby, Emubands, IODA…(without mentioning the duplication in the last two).
The simple truth is that while a long list of digital music stores might look good, beyond the top 3 or 4 retailers it makes very little difference to overall sales how many your music’s in. It’s fairly common knowledge that iTunes is the biggest player in the market, but the scale of their dominance is pretty staggering. Neilsen (the ratings and market reporting firm) reports total US music sales of 1,513 million units in 2008, with 1070 million of those sales being digital downloads. That’s a billion digital music downloads across the entire US.
In 2008, across all territories, iTunes sold more than Two Billion tracks.
| Apple iTunes Store Music Sales |
| Date |
Tracks Sold (Millions) |
| 01/08/2004 |
100 |
| 16/12/2004 |
200 |
| 02/03/2005 |
300 |
| 10/05/2005 |
400 |
| 18/07/2005 |
500 |
| 10/01/2006 |
850 |
| 23/02/2006 |
1,000 |
| 12/09/2006 |
1,500 |
| 10/01/2007 |
2,000 |
| 09/04/2007 |
2,500 |
| 31/07/2007 |
3,000 |
| 15/01/2008 |
4,000 |
| 19/06/2008 |
5,000 |
| 06/01/2009 |
6,000 |
Excuse the horrid old excel graph, I’m still running Office ‘03…
It’s difficult to get a believable estimate for the size of the global digital music market, but given that the USA is the biggest single economy by a long way (the whole of the EU only just beats it in the CIA factbook at $14.98 trillion to $14.58 trillion), you begin to get a picture of how much of a monopoly iTunes has. Their competitors are of a different order: Amazon weighed in at 27 million digital tracks sold in the first six months of 2008, and the CEO of eMusic (David Pakman) estimated that Amazon have got about 4%-5% of the US music market, which going from Neilsen’s estimates puts them at about 48,150,000 tracks annually. Pakman also claims an approx. 10%-15% market share for eMusic, with 7 million downloads sold monthly (7*12 = 84).
By browsing eMusic’s sales milestone press releases, you can plot a rough course for their sales:
| eMusic Digital Music Sales |
| Date |
Tracks Sold (Millions) |
| 01/09/2004 |
0 |
| 01/12/2004 |
3 |
| 01/12/2006 |
100 |
| 25/09/2007 |
160 |
| 14/04/2008 |
200 |
| 20/11/2008 |
250 |
I’ll spare you another ugly graph. eMusic has sold 250 million tracks since it’s relaunch in 2004, and Amazon’s only been going for about a year now, 300 million tracks let’s say, which pales beside iTunes’ 6 billion total sales.
One can argue with the estimates, but the main thrust of my argument is hopefully becoming clear. A conservative 15% market share between Amazon and eMusic, along with iTunes’ >80% doesn’t leave more than 5% for any other players in the USA: with just those three selling your music for you online, you’ve got 95% of the market covered. It’s not that the remaining 5% isn’t worth catering to, but the law of diminishing returns kicks in, and customers in the last few percentiles get harder and harder to chase down, especially given the plethora of blossoming and failing little music shops that appear and dissappear. We concentrate our efforts on the vendors that matter.
P.S.
The controversial bulk of music discovery and consumption in the electronic wilderness, outside the paid-for enclosure, is happening on torrent sites like the embattled Pirate Bay, and the more respectable Limewire and Mininova, and promoting RouteNote artists on these channels is something we’re looking into. Ubiquitous innovator Trent Reznor or NIN positively encourages people to download his music from P2P networks, in order to drive sales of his ‘premium’ paid for content.
It has been reported over at Paidcontent that music startup and recommendation service iLike is on the block for sale. Currently there are several companies interested in iLike, such as existing stakeholder Ticketmaster and online music pioneer RealNetworks.
iLike has already raised about $16 million in funding since its launch in 2006. Additionally, in the mix to purchase iLike is Facebook, who recently got nocked back to purchase Twitter. iLike currently has one of the most popular Facebook apps, attracting about 5.4 million active users per month, but a pure stock play is likely to go over as well as it did with Twitter.
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