We’ve just launched our new upload tool, designed to make adding your music to our service quick and straightforward. You’ll need to sign in to your RouteNote account, and then you’ll find a link to download the new tool on the ‘Upload’ page. The program is available for all operating systems, and will install onto your desktop. From there you can add in all the music and image files, as well as the metadata (track, artist and album information) necessary to put an upload together. The program will then let you know about any errors in file format or album info before you send it to us, so you won’t need to wait for our admin dept. to get back to you with any issues, you can save the data entry process at any point before you send it, so that you can come back to a session later, without the risk of losing your progress, and uploads can be queued and sent while you’re not using the computer for other stuff online. Using the upload tool means that won’t lose your progress if the computer crashes during the upload, you can just restart the process once you’re up again. We’ve also streamlined the data entry process so that you don’t need to put the same information in multiple times for multiple tracks, releases are grouped by album, so the program knows which track is attached to which release.
We’ve put the tool together to make things easier and quicker for you while uploading, and to try and eliminate common errors from the upload process, and we hope that you think we’ve succeeded. Any feedback or comments on the tool once you’ve had a go at using it would be very welcome. You can comment on this post, or send email to support@routenote.com.
RouteNote launched back in April 16th 2008 and since that time we have we have been focused on providing the masses with the same opportunities as was only previously given to the major label artists. RouteNote is the leading online music distribution service that has no upfront fees or costs and that is where we are hoping to stay.
RouteNote was launched with some major online retailers already on board, such as iTunes and eMusic. RouteNote works on the basis that we offer free distribution services to artists from all over the world. Artists head to RouteNote and can choose to upload their music to any of our partners (iTunes, Emusic, Amazon Mp3, Last.fm and more). Artists then receive 90% of all revenues derived from these partners in which is paid monthly.
So why choose RouteNote over our competitors?
- No upfront fees
- No monthly costs
- Artists keep 100% ownership of their music
- Artists receive 90% of all net revenues
- Free UPC and ISRC codes
- Artists from Anywhere in the world are accepted
RouteNote is a very service orientated business and customer service is what we pride ourselves on, because working closely with our artists means that we have the opportunity to really push and drive their sales which of course is our aim. RouteNote makes sure that artists have their music in all of the relevant places, and knows that the contemporaneous placement of music within these all these services is important, so we provide a speedy 3-4 week service to get your tracks from uploaded to live.
Providing great customer service has really help our artists get on to the service fast and more efficiently, which has really helped them to focus on driving sales. Our best example recently is that Megassus (a RouteNote contributor) held the number 1, 4 and 8th positions in the New age genre within eMusic.
RouteNote partner Amazon has launched their ever popular music store Amazon Mp3 in the UK. Amazon Mp3 contains over 5 million DRM free tracks. On an individual track basis, the store has variable pricing, with songs starting at 59p, but other categories for tracks costing 60p-69p, 70p-79p, and over 80p. Albums are more variable, although £6.49 appears to be one popular price point for new albums. However, I have noticed at the moment they are pushing out major track downloads for only £0.29.
Amazon Mp3 for the UK was launched on Wednesday of last week without any press although British-based music blog MusicAlly was the first to spot it.
The increased competition brought about by a heavyweight like Amazon stepping into the ring may already have had an effect on music pricing in the United Kingdom. MusicAlly reports that as Amazon MP3 launched there, Apple dropped its prices on key albums in the British version of iTunes, including those by Oasis and Fleet Foxes, to under $6.
Over at MusicAlly they have pointed out that the new U2 album (No Line On The Horizon) is currently on Amazon’s US Mp3 store for only $3.99. However, because we are based in the UK there is nowhere we can get this album for so cheap, until now. Tesco has taken the step forward and is now selling the new U2 album in a week-long deal for ony £3.97.
This shows that the digital music store price wars are about to heat up! However, you will notice that iTunes never seems to get into these price wars.
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.
Amazon has just launched their
Mp3 Music store in the UK. The store can be found at
http://mp3.amazon.co.uk. The simple-to-use digital music store offering over 3 million DRM-free (Digital Rights Management) songs which will work on any MP3 player including the iPod™- with top-selling albums from just £3 and individual songs from 59p.
Amazon Mp3 UK has all four major labels signed up, SonyBMG, Universal Music, EMI Music and Warner Music – and leading independents such as Cooking Vinyl, Harmonia Mundi, Beggars Banquet, The Orchard, Concord and IODA.
A revamped Walmart.com MP3 store launched today with aggressive pricing and new features that take full advantage of Walmart’s reach, clout and the chain’s brick and mortar locations:
- 3 million MP3’s from all four major labels and some independents
- Top 25 songs from artists start at $.74. Standard pricing is $.94
- Free Track Of The Week
- Free mp3 of the customer’s choice with every CD purchase in stores or online beginning mid-November
- Exclusive Soundcheck performances including upcoming shows with Beyonce, Nickelback and current American Idol, David Cook
The new download store also includes social features to display albums on social networking sites and blogs, as well as, enhanced search and discovery features.
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