Archive for: amazon
AIM (Association of Independent Music) has released their latest digital sales figures for indie labels and bands and it claims that 94.4% of all indie digital revenues is via iTunes, Amazon and Spotify. Everything else is fighting over just 5.6% of the market.
Alison Wenham, head of the UK-based consortium, pointed to a lopsided logjam. ”There are now a series of monopolies and it is jolly hard for anyone else to get a slice of the market”.
In the US there is still no Spotify presence and it seems as though eMusic is the third largest player, but Im sure they will change when Spotify finally enter the US this year.
Amie Street has been acquired and merged into Amazon. Amie Street allowed customers to purchase digital downloads at a price that was dependent upon the popularity of the track. Over time a lot of artists tried out the service, songs were downloaded over 10 million times. The Amie Street team will be focused on Songza, which they acquired back in 2009.
According to Techcrunch:
Amazon will redirect Amie Street to a new cobranded Amie Street/Amazon Music Service site and give users a $5 coupon to purchase songs on Amazon. But while the users and the brand are being acquired, Amazon will most likely ditch the business model, say the founders (stressing that they don’t know for sure).
More innovation bites the dust!
There is a lot of talk this morning about Sony planning to launch a new music and video subscription service based around its Playstation 3 console. However, the Financial Times reports that the service will also have a presence on Walkman music players, Sony Ericsson mobile handsets, Vaio computers, Bravia TVs and Sony Blu-ray players. Additionally, it claims that the service will launch next year.
In separate news, the Wall Street Journal claims that Amazon is working on its own subscription service, albeit focused initially on TV shows and movies rather than music. The WSJ reports that Amazon is pitching the web-based service to NBC Universal, Time Warner, News Corporation and Viacom among other media owners. Its webby nature would mean Amazon’s service would also be accessible through connected TVs, Blu-ray players and games consoles.
RouteNote is very proud to announce that one of our artists, Lee Crossley, has just reached the number #2 slot in the Amazon Rock charts. This is an amazing effort from Lee, who has been working very hard gigging for the last 18 months. Im really glad it has finally paid off!
You can check out his track on Amazon here.
We thought that all RouteNote artists might be interested in a new free service from Amazon, called Artist Central.
Artist Central allows artists to add their own content to Amazon.com Artist Stores. This helps music fans on amazon.com discover artists and their work more easily, and leads to greater sales.
Users can upload photos, a bio, videos, and audio for promotional streaming, as well as utilize new features like a Twitter widget and customizable banners to create a robust, customized Artist Store on Amazon.com, ultimately helping customers discover artists and their work more easily. Check out the artist store for Band of Horses (www.amazon.com/bandofhorses) to see these features in action.
Artist Central is completely free to anyone selling their music on Amazon.com. Getting started is easy and only takes a few minutes. Just go to Artist Central (http://artistcentral.amazon.com) and sign in with your Amazon account to claim your artist. (If there is currently no artist store for your artist, you can click “Create a new Artist Store”.) Claims are usually approved within 1-2 days.
Once you have been approved, you can then add your photos, video, banners and more. Please review the Artist Page Banner Creation Tips and Guidelines when creating a banner for your artist store. The Guidelines can be downloaded from the banner upload tool on the Artist Central site.
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.
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.
