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.]
|
Signup Fee – All stores – 1yr |
UPC |
Sales Percentage |
|||
|
Distributor |
Single |
EP (5 Track) |
Album (15 Track) |
|
|
|
CD Baby |
$35.00 |
$35.00 |
$35.00 |
$20.00 |
9% |
|
Ditto Music |
$41.18 |
$41.18 |
$41.18 |
$0.00 |
0% |
|
DMD |
$82.35 |
$197.65 |
$329.41 |
$0.00 |
0% |
|
Emubands |
$41.09 |
$57.56 |
$82.27 |
$0.00 |
0% |
|
Musicadium |
$101.79 |
$101.79 |
$101.79 |
$40.10 |
0% |
|
RouteNote |
$0.00 |
$0.00 |
$0.00 |
$0.00 |
10% |
|
The Gene Pool |
$9.87 |
$49.33 |
$49.41 |
$0.00 |
10% |
|
Tunecore |
$9.99 |
$41.76 |
$51.66 |
$0.00 |
0% |
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”.
Ditto Music – To err on the side of caution we’ve chosen the cheapest of Ditto’s package deals and options; they’ve got a whole raft of them, from £24 a year for single store distribution (only to iTunes and Spotify) up to £50 for premium or dance store distribution, with add ons like chart registration (£55) and iTunes fast-tracking (£70) and pre-releases (£25) that could end up costing a lot more. All their packages come with a £24 per year administration fee on top of the signup costs. Their payments system is based on RoyaltyShare’s platform, which is a reassurance in terms of their legitimacy, but it does bite into your revenues, as RS take a slice of the back end, of course, whoever you get paid by there will always be transaction charges (we use PayPal and do our own accounting).
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 [Ditto claim 700!], 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)]
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20 Comments
First off, I find your pricing straight-forward and reasonable, and will most definitely consider you for future releases.
That said, however, there are two aspects missing from your discussion here:
1) Widgets. The quality of the tools available to market one’s releases is a major part of the deal for me. A distributer goes beyond making your releases available, and actually helps in facilitating sales, would be my choice every time.
This brings me to the next point:
2) A modern distributer should do more than just pass your music along to itunes etc. They should also help with marketing, provide tools, and market to boutique retailers etc
IODA and Orchard, etc. are, in that sense, much more like traditional distributers, whereas I think of almost all of the above-named (yourself included) more as “aggregators”.
IODA etc actually market releases to boutique store like Boomkat, Beatport and Insound, not just the mass-market outlets. For the niche-market artist this is essential! Itunes having an 88% market share, doesn’t mean nearly as much as you think it does, once you consider that virtually the same percentage is made up solely of major label artists and very well established independent artists.
For the same reason that an unknown artist sell more physical CDs in smaller independent shops, artists who can get their music into small boutique mp3 retail outlets ought to fare well.
The real downside to IODA and similar distributers is, of course, that they are extremely selective about who they work with. Smaller artists stand very little chance of having IODA and the like pick them up.
But given the option, I think it’s what they add over-and-beyond the big retail outlets that make them so interesting.
The first “aggregator” to start offering those contacts and connections to boutique retailers etc. will fare best in this increasingly crowded market.
- Mark
A little fact correction, Dashiel! Our singles are $9.99–I’m not sure where you got that huge number from. The $9.99 includes ALL stores you want (you still get to pick them), all territories, etc., and the yearly on a single is also only $9.99.
Since you get to pick your stores, even albums can be less than you calculated, by $0.99 for each store.
Thanks!
–Peter
peter@tunecore.com
The Tunecore website is down for maintenance.
We appreciate your patience, and we expect to be back online by Wed, Dec 2, 2009, 11:00 AM EST.
Regarding your comments on niche stores, we’re aware that a larger proportion of electronic music is sold through them than the mainstream stores like iTunes, and we’re in the process of expanding our retail partners roster to include a few of the bigger ones. Hopefully by the time your next release is ready they’ll be live!
Hi Dashiel,
A few corrections.
In your post it says we’re ‘offline’ which is false, as customers can upload (YouSendIt) and pay online (PayPal) and monitor their sales through their EmuBands login.
The $1,400 figure is way off the mark as well – after $1,188 of album sales you’re better off with us – that’s 119 copies of an album. We would pose the question; why continue to pay your distributor for something they’ve already done?
Kind Regards,
Stuart
A list of the stores that each distribute to (the major players at least) would have been handy.
If a distributor doesn’t do Spotify I don’t care how cheap they are.
I think your info on CD Baby is wrong. I looked into them before going with RecordUnion, who unfortunately aren’t on this list and are VERY competitive in terms of price. You don’t have to sign up to CD Baby’s physical distribution any more, you can just do digital. [EDIT - If you can find this on their site, I'd like to see it...]
Please add another distributor to your list, AWAL
(http://www.awal.com).
How does RouteNote compare with them?
They are at: Sheffield Technology Park,
Arundel Street, Sheffield, S1 2NS, United Kingdom
Thanks very much for this breakdown of costs and services. It’s nice to see the players in this space weighing in on their offerings. Makes for a great resource for artists who are at the beginning stages of the process and are looking for comprehensive comparisons. Will watch this space and hope to read more.
Hey Dashiel,
FIrst off, thanks a ton for responding to my comment. I think you might well be right in terms of widgets. It’s a science to get them right, and perhaps it’s better we let distributors do what they do best and leave widget designs to developers etc., rather than make some half-baked widgets oneself and drive up the overall costs and fees.
Also, I’m very excited to see what some of the stores you plan on working with will be. I would like to point out that I did not claim that “a larger proportion of electronic music is sold through [boutique online retailers] than the mainstream stores like iTunes.
Instead, I wrote:
“Artists who can get their music into small boutique mp3 retail outlets ought to fare well.” Over 60% of my digital sales are through itunes, and most of the rest comes via name-your-own-price models with bandcamp.com.
I am under no illusions regarding iTunes’ importance, but I do believe that the often quoted 88% market share is somewhat distorted by major label artists, and that were independent artists able to sell their music via high-quality boutique stores, that iTunes’ share would end up somewhat closer to 50-70%.
Anyhow, best of luck with everything, and I’ll be certain to keep checking in with routenote.
Cheerio,
Mark
Thank you much for all the info and ‘responders’ with corrections. This type of upfront info is very valueable to an Artist. I used Tunecore for my first CD…have no complaints as a first timer.
I’m looking to release a single; weighing my options – in search of the best bang for my buck.
I’d like to know which of these offer XM Radio as part of their distribution package? Or is that a totally different beast altogether?
Again thanks for the info and keep up the good work.
Barbrah
I’m also interested in which services are best if you’re releasing multiple singles. It’s quite confusing trying to figure it all out.
I too am interested in which ones inlcude Spotify.
Thanks!
Robert
i put my music on all the itunes stores and myspace threw tunecore, it all cost about $25.95, i have made that back from very little sales, and am still selling and keeping 100% royalty, if i went with you guys i would loose money, your 10% does not make sense.
i will be paying tunecore $19.95 a year for my album, but if i was to pay them 10% i would be paying out more, so people do not believe the hype, you only loose money if your music sells less then 100 tracks (tracks not albums), and if they do not you should not be trying to sell music.
Hi Hakan Tuna:
Lets say you sell 200 tracks per year at $1.00 (which in reality its more like $0.60 retained for the artist at most).
Tunecore = $25.95 (but I think its more for an album) – sales of $200 = Total = $ 174.05
RouteNote = $0 costs. $200 sales – Artist keeps 90% = $180.00 retained.
i am going to do this based on facts, i deal in sterling which is easier for me to work out… i actually sell music on itunes so the figures are correct..
i get 49p per track sold on itunes, so lets compare
100 sales
tunecore = £49.00 – £16.23 = £32.77
routnote = £49.00 – 10% = £44.10
200 sales
tunecore = £98.00 – £16.23 = £81.77
routnote = £98.00 – 10% = £88.20
300 sales
tunecore = £147.00 – £16.23 = £130.77
routnote = 147.00 – 10% = 132.30
400 sales
tunecore = £196.00 – 16.23 = £179.77
routnote = 196.00 – 10% = 176.40
SO AS YOU CAN SEE IF YOU SELL LESS THEN 400 SONGS A YEAR ON ITUNES THEN ROUTNOTE IS FOR YOU, BUT IF YOU SELL MORE THEN 400 (and not 10′000 as stated by routenote) then your better of with tunecore..
LETS COMPARE JUST 1000 SONGS SOLD….!
TUNECORE £490 – 16.23 = £473.77
ROUTNOTE £490 – 10% = £441.00
a loss of £32.77 in other words you loose 52 DOLLARS per 1000 sales if you went with routnote…
so if your going to bring a single out and expect to sell less then 400 then routnote is for you, but if your serious about selling music and expect to sell more then 400 from your single then tunecore is the best way.
Hi Dashiel,
just thought I would correct you on Musicadium’s single pricing. We now have a single price – which is $59.00 AUD + GST = $64.90 AUD
Cheers
Tim
Dear Dashiel,
Thanks for the nice blog and also for all the comments posted here. I recently joined TuneCore and uploaded my album (containing 8 tracks). In a way what you say is right about TuneCore. By the time I added each of my tracks and also added them to each different store the amount got bigger and bigger and it all added up to 100+ dollars! I have even paid them that sum!! Am just hoping that it’s all worth it but am still unsure how much I will be spending each year?!!
Again, you made a point very clear in your blog regarding 10% share. If someone is selling millions then fair enough try something else or if its for an independent artist selling small to moderate number I still think Routenote may be the option. I will see how my experience with TuneCore will be and will probably try routenote for my upcoming album.
Any thoughts?