Wesley McCants
Member of BMI
Disabled Vietnam Veteran

Post Script: How can a company swindle a disabled veteran and sleep at night?

ive been reading and asking around about EU distributors, i found 4 artists who where ripped of by Zimbalam, 3 where automated scams, their albums went online with mismatched titles., the 4th one was a typo in no way the automated system could of been responsible since their receipts clearly show the title.

the 4th scam exposes deliberate tampering with their system, manually!

Zimbalam normally sends PDF receipts verifying titles of the album when you pay along with contract via email and paypal, once the album is approved, the artists gets a second email alerting that it was uploaded.

Zimbalam sent an email receipt to this one artists, yet after a period of 45 days of waiting the artists goes to see why they never got a approval email to find out it is in stores on itunes etc,

The Artists contacts Zimbalam to notify them of the title typo, Zimbalam instead responds in an email claiming the whole process was rejected by their automated system because the art work was the wrong resolution, but how can it of been rejected before uploaded yet online, so the artists responds to alert them its already uploaded, Zimbalam responds with a email error, can not reply to email etc.

Artists sends another email to Zimbalam to alert them but they instead offer two choices, change artwork or pay to pull Album.

this is clearly a scam and Zimbalam sounds arrogant about dealing with anything wrong on their part, i say this company is a fraud.

I’m more interested in getting music on TV, in ads or programmes, or in movies, than I am in topping the charts. A combination of Routenote, Sentric and Bandcamp is my ideal setup.

That said, I’m part of two other more commercially viable projects and it has been left up to me to handle distribution… I’ll most likely still use Routenote. There’s no bullcrap and none of the raging egoism that you find with other distributors such as Tunecore and Ditto.

They distribute to fewer stores, yes, but most of us only really need iTunes, Amazon and Spotify.

The only thing I don’t about like about Routenote is the purple colour scheme!!

I must say this has been a very interesting blog to read including the stirr between everyone writing comments!

What I think would be a good (and fair) idea is for people who have their work distributed to write a comment below stating what their ideal distributor would be and why (and keep it sensible and realistic!) as this way, you might find that some distributors might take the points into consideration!

Give it a try!

Matt

[...] iTunes? (Fool.com June 2010) DOJ questioning Apple’s hold on digital music (ZDNet May 2010) Digital Music Distributors Compared (again) Routenote Nov 2009) Music Retail:The Rise of Digital (Mint.com Nov 2009) How To Get Your Music Into [...]

The Soundcloud and FaceBook players are just the same.

I see routenote (or an ‘ideal’ distributor) being the most transparent and painless way to iTunes/Amazon/Spotify without sending me into the red and without expecting them to promote me (or other artists on the service) for some abitrary fee that may or may not be worthwhile.

Leave Routenote to do what they focus on, they have a good idea here on what a lot of ‘true’ indies want. We can take care of a lot of promotion/widgets/website stuff ourself – we just need that foot in the door to itunes at as good a price as possible.

And as was stated there’s really little need for Routenote to provide widgets etc when many sites already do it well (for free). Especially if it mean they started adding on mysterious ‘admin fees’ which would put them right back down the list, lost in the mire again.

If routenote is above board (and I’ll be googling as much as I can in the next few days) then I think they could be what CD Baby USED to be for physical CDs (but for pure Digital only), that is they understand what is needed and don’t try and glam up their package to inflate prices for things that 9/10 make no difference to sales in the real world.

We are the labels now, and we bring in the guys who can do the slickest jobs in each area – none can do ‘all’ perfectly, it’s up to us to hand pick the best in each category and for distribution to the places that matter – I can’t fault routenote if everything is as good as it seems from looking around the site.

I’ve been with CDBaby (before the ill fated ‘re-launch’ completely ruined all confidence I had in them), I moved to Zimbalam – who had been above board, clear and fair – one off fee as stated above – for a while.

Today I found out (quite accidentally) that Zimbalam have now changed to the annual fee structure (and 100% profit no cut). I do not like this.

The guy further up saying ‘you shouldn’t be selling music if you can’t sell more than 100 tracks a year’… where do you get off?

Ok an album with 10+ tracks, maybe if you are lucky in this climate you will sell 50 albums, maybe even 100 and easily make back your yearly fee… but what about SINGLES??? Singles that die off, that you still want on iTunes/Amazon for years but know they are more to complete your catalogue for new fans rather than ‘big money makers’… if you had say 20 singles out, after five years you would be paying upkeep on those (even though they are no longer selling really) of £100 (zimbalam) or worse with places like Tunecore etc.

It’s very shortsighted to get annoyed at a 10% ‘cut’ and think that’s somehow worse than being annually fleeced regardless of your sales. 10% cut on actual sales is as fair as it gets! You don’t sell then you don’t pay. If you really sold so many hundreds of thousands that you ended up paying Routenote (etc) say, £10k in commision so what, you’ve just MADE £90k!

The other side is when you sell little, and you end up paying every last bit of profit back to the distributor just to keep your releases ‘alive’ while you spend half a year or more recording a new album that will hopefully make more.

It’s getting to the point that I don’t trust any distributor as I can’t work out why they would care about artists, Zimbalam has just proved this to me, I thought they were different but they’ve obviously seen how to increase their own profits while ‘taking’ from those who can least afford it (i.e not the big sellers who don’t care one way or the other, nor should as they laughing all the way to the bank).

Routenote, I’m going to try out with a single perhaps in the near future. It’s very much about the ability to ‘release’ without worrying about an annual fee and being able to afford to creatively release (single tracks, 2 track singles, EPs and albums) without only being able to release 12+ track albums for fear of ‘breaking even’.

As an aside, the vast majority of my sales in the past have come firstly via iTunes (of course) then via Amazon… everything after that is barely worth mentioning. I’m on spotify and have seen NOTHING in revenue from that though I treat it more as marketing to be on there… it’s good to be on it, but it will never make you money – i’m glad Routenote have spotify but I would use it optionally for different releases (I would perhaps NOT release entire albums to Spotify and try and get as much money back via iTunes/Amazon (routenote) and directly via Bandcamp).