Deezer is a French business, but has agreements with all 4 major labels to stream ad-supported music to their 9 million registered users across 35 different countries. In the three years since its launch, Deezer has been voted the most innovative website of 2007 by readers of 01Net, ahead of both Facebook and Dailymotion. Deezer also won the 2008 Red Herring award, for Europe’s most innovative web companies, among various other awards. The proof of their success is really in the number of people listening to music through their service, which keeps on growing. In addition to their music streaming service, Deezer also offers:
- Access to radio channels: Hip Hop, Rock, Electro, Jazz, Live, French Scene, Disco etc.
- Surfing intelligent online radio
- Information about artists, albums, tracks, introducing subscribers to new music
- Sharing playlists, chat and musical tastes with friends via the community of ‘Deezernautes’
- Watch videos
Napster was the first cat among the digital pigeons with it’s peer to peer service, but they’ve come a long way since their rebellious beginnings, and now their subscription service offers both unlimited streaming and a number of DRM free downloads per month, available online and on smartphones in Europe and the USA.
Thumbplay is the largest mobile content provider in the U.S. Operating both web based and mobile services, including licensed music, video and games. They have deals with all the majors, and several independent labels and artists, and now you can get access to their services through RouteNote. Hundreds of millions of cellphones in the US are waiting to download your music.
To get your music live with these music stores and all our other online music partners, sign up for our music distribution service, and get our new music upload tool. You can have your tracks online in minutes, and earning you money in a matter of weeks.
Hot Chip are previewing their new album ‘One Life Stand’ over on the Guardian’s website (unfortunately only fully available in the UK), via We7’s streaming service.
The album itself is a return to their previous form, mixing heavily electronic beats and samples with roomy, live sounding instruments at will, but always with delicate care and attention, Baroque sounding string synths, trashy Pixies-esque drum kits, steel drums, marimbas[?], vocoders [ sorry Justin ], and flagrantly dance sounding bass lines nestle in together under the distinctive semi-falsetto vocals rising above the tracks, blending elements of electronic music from the last two decades together in a disctinctively stylish way.
Hot Chip may not have the bass-thumping force of other electronic acts like Simian Mobile Disco and the Chemical Brothers, but this album drips energy and musicality. Check out the video of the album’s title track they’ve posted on their Dino-space – if you like it you might consider catching them on their current tour, visiting most regions of the UK before moving on to Europe and America, full listings below.
You can also pre-order the album from their website, getting yourself a free bonus track in the process (but sadly obviating the need for a digital distributor, ho hum…)
The Orchard’s majority stock owners, Dimensional Associates, are considering a bid from music streaming service eMusic’s owners, JDS Capital. JDS have been angling for a majority in The Orchard for a while, and this is the third time they’ve come to the table with a new bid, this time of $2, up from their original price of $1.68.
The period between the announcement of the initial bid and this last news has seen the Orchard’s stock prices climb out of the trough they were in last October (a $1.05 low point). The advantages to the tie in of a music distributor and a music streaming service are obvious, as eMusic would gain unlimited access to The Orchard’s catalogue, and take advantage of the entire chain of profit between musician and consumer, using their own services to promote artists they think will sell.
The Germans call it an Ohrwurm, which translates as Ear Worm – the kind of song that burrows deep into your mind and won’t let you think of anything else. The kind of track you find yourself humming and infecting other people with. Well Rednex – who are nearly as big as the Hoff in Germany, have produced a new track ‘Devil’s on the Loose’, equally as poisonous but fortunately much less catchy. They’ve had millions of downloads so far, and are very pleased with themselves for getting the placement on TPB’s homepage. The stunt will undoubtedly create publicity for both parties (I’m already writing about it, and so are other bloggers), but the really odd thing about it is Rednex’s political stand on their reasons for teaming up with the Bay:
Pirate Bay is among the Top 100 most visited sites in the world with 20 million visitors per day and we are on the FRONT PAGE. Not to mention how much we admire them. If you want to know why, read here.
If you like the song, if you love us or even if you hate us and love someone else, please consider giving us a donation (click here)! We are giving away our songs for free now and have absolutely NO CLUE how to make money to make new songs & videos, but whatever, we’ll sort it out somehow.
Time to go… we got some SERIOUS CELEBRATION TO DO, YOU WACKPOTZ !!!
…”Whatever, we’ll sort it out somehow.”?! That’s a sensible attitude to online marketing… There’s more of this sort of wierdness on the 28 page [!] online greeting and manifesto they’ve published through their site, referring to their linkup with TPB. For me, the cherry on top is the opportunity to buy the band and all their doings for $2.9 million dollars, as advertised on their site as part of their ‘membership’ page, where they’ve got a Josh Freese style list of packages that you can buy to support them (a private show costs a mere E11,111).
E2,000,000: Buy all of it and Rednex is all yours! Put your grandmas dog in the band, release 87 different remixes of Cotton Eye Joe and call the next album “When I went fishing with Stephen Hawking and he just went on and on about gluons and morons… BAH!” (OR do something serious and profitable with it), it is totally up to you! Anything goes cause you are the boss! Make world history and become the first one ever to buy your own No.1 pop band! For more information, go to www.rednexforsale.com. (you can’t buy it here cause first we need to sign a lot of papers and shit)
I can’t decide whether I think this is genius or madness, but it’s certainly novel. Perhaps it’s just refreshingly honest. A band of Wackpotz that can [amazingly] get themselves loads of airplay and online exposure, but have no idea how to monetise it – seems a bit like the early days of Twitter, when they had millions of users, but no idea how to make the service profitable. Instead of flailing about trying to sell their music, they just want to cash in with someone who knows what they’re doing and then take their foot off the gas. Sounds nearly as lazy as their repetitive, samey music [whoops, did I type that out lo[u]d?].
While I can’t deny that they’re making a splash with their new track, I’d suggest to anyone distributing their music through RouteNote that you think a little harder about monetising your album before you launch into this kind of opportunity, and get yourself into a position to really take advantage of it. Maybe have a look at our online music self promotion guide first!
[Edit: Merry Christmas - stop reading blogs and go eat some turkey]
Artist Name: JINGLE CATS
Genre: Holiday
Location: HOLLYWOOD, CA USA
A long time ago in the frosty North Pole, nine kittens were born on Christmas Eve at Santa’s house. Mrs. Claus found them on the porch. They were very hungry and she gave them some milk. The mother was nowhere to be found. Mrs. Claus brought them into the house and set them down in front of the Elves. They mewed and purred with joy because they had been outside quite a long time. When Santa came home from delivering gifts to all the good girls and boys he put on a Christmas record and an amazing thing occured. The Jingle Cats began to sing along with the music. Everyone laughed and cheered and the Jingle Cats brought joy to the entire North Pole that year. Now, with each Christmas, the Jingle Cats ride with Santa on his sleigh and sing songs along the way. Many ordinary cats can hear them even when they are high above the clouds. All cats know about the Jingle Cats and they look out their windows for them each Christmas. If your cat winks in your eyes you will know that he has seen the Jingle Cats riding high. Oh what a joyful sound.
Imeem is still waiting for a signature on the deal selling the all-but-defunct company to Myspace – and the writing is far from on the wall as to how successful the integration of the two company’s software and customer bases could possibly be, especially when you take into account MOG’s recent and Spotify’s impending US launches of their streaming music services. Will anyone go to a band’s myspace page to listen to a few tracks if they can just hear the whole catalogue for free on Spotify? Perhaps not, but Myspace must still consider they’ve got a great deal, considering that Imeem spent at least $25 million on building their brand, technology and user base, and the sale price is rumoured to be as low as $1 million. According to Digital Music News, it was a legal dispute with our digital distribution competitor the Orchard that finally pushed the ailing social network over the edge and forced the negotiation of a sale:
“We held an emergency board meeting to shut everything down,” one executive told Digital Music News. “The [Orchard] lawsuit was definitely the final nail.”
Subsequently, other executives close to the situation confirmed the decision. “They just ran out of cash, it was just a cash thing,” one executive shared, also anonymously. “The potential liabilities – $150,000 per stream – could get astronomical. [Imeem] thought they had a case, but they couldn’t afford to fight it.”
I think it’s a shame that Imeem has been forced to give up their autonomy, but the fact of their acquisition by Myspace shows who got the model the right way round; Imeem couldn’t stay afloat because they couldn’t afford to pay for the licensing costs of the music they were using from the advertising they sold, and because they were not efficient enough in properly securing the rights to use it, hence the court case threatened by the Orchard, whereas Myspace gets everyone to sign up their music for free – read their sign-up agreement again – and their proposition snowballed, a little free music, and a few million users kept growing until they had every major act and every teenage girl in America signed up. The combination of huge traffic and no licensing costs meant that they were able to pocket all of their ad revenue, but they are not as attractive a proposition to the artists and record labels as there is no revenue coming back to them in the same way that Spotify sends money upstream per play, unless, like the major labels, you’ve got enough clout to demand a revenue sharing deal. If MOG or Spotify can find a way to include the band info and minor social element that Myspace provided, or perhaps team up with Facebook to provide music streaming and playlist sharing then Myspace will be blown out of the water – regardless of which little social startups they squash into their business in the meantime.
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.
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)]
We posted yesterday about EMI’s bleak balance sheet: today they’re in the news with a new Hulu page for Norah Jones, presumably the first of many of their artists that will be featuring on the site. I think this adoption of new channels can only be a good thing for the industry. It might feel like EMI are the first to be making these deals with new service providers because they’re under financial pressure, but from this support and collaboration between big record labels and innovative new channels the next mainstream will be born, and those industry players that adopt early will have a headstart on their competitors in terms of implementation and consumer base. EMI’s cooperation will hopefully encourage the others in the big 4 to follow suit – the ground is being laid as we speak: Spotify is preparing their platform for a US launch, youtube’s collab with the majors ‘Vevo’ will launch within a month, and the big guys are warming to the idea of online streaming services, as this Hulu/EMI deal shows. I’m betting that the record labels will swallow the bitter pill of lower per track fees, the big online channels will fight it out with the rights industries over standard rates, and the dust will settle with most people using ad-supported on demand streaming services, with a smallish percentage of us opting to buy the premium ad free offerings like the one our digital distribution partner Spotify offers.
Billing itself as “Europe’s leading festival for new music” Brighton’s 3 day festival in May has just opened its artist registration page, hoping to attract new bands to play at their May 2010 event. While we can’t agree with their recommendation that you sign up with Zimbalam for your digital distribution needs, we do recommend that you give yourself every chance of getting on stage at as many festivals as possible next year!
Deezer is a French business, but has agreements with all 4 major labels to stream ad-supported music to their 9 million registered users across 35 different countries. In the three years since its launch, Deezer has been voted the most innovative website of 2007 by readers of 01Net, ahead of both Facebook and Dailymotion. Deezer also won the 2008 Red Herring award, for Europe’s most innovative web companies, among various other awards. The proof of their success is really in the number of people listening to music through their service, which keeps on growing. In addition to their music streaming service, Deezer also offers:
Napster was the first cat among the digital pigeons with it’s peer to peer service, but they’ve come a long way since their rebellious beginnings, and now their subscription service offers both unlimited streaming and a number of DRM free downloads per month, available online and on smartphones in Europe and the USA.
Thumbplay is the largest mobile content provider in the U.S. Operating both web based and mobile services, including licensed music, video and games. They have deals with all the majors, and several independent labels and artists, and now you can get access to their services through RouteNote. Hundreds of millions of cellphones in the US are waiting to download your music.
[Edit: Merry Christmas - stop reading blogs and go eat some turkey]
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