The not-so-cherubic singer has signed with music investment group Power Amp, a fund that specialises in “providing equitable finance for established artists to record and market new music.” The deal will provide her with the funds to record and produce a new album independently, in return for revenues from all aspects of Charlotte’s music career:
“Rather than investing in an artists record only, Power Amp invests in all areas of an artists career: recording, publishing, touring, merchandising and sponsorship etc.”
Which sounds pretty much like a 360 deal to us. Madonna’s got one, so why shouldn’t Charlotte Church? She’s quoted on the FT as saying:
‘[The deal] provides me with a financial commitment equivalent to that of a major record company but with a much greater degree of control and ownership over my career’
Fair enough, if you’ve got national profile and the experience of releasing an album with a major label under your belt – C.C. released her previous album with Sony BMG – and the trend certainly seems to be towards self releasing music and working with independent digital music distributors like us here at RouteNote, which we obviously welcome. At any rate, why Ms. Church needs to borrow the money from an investment group rather than funding herself is a little mysterious… Perhaps her fee for being a chat show host wasn’t quite as astronomically high as Clarkson’s.
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.
Emusic has just announced that they’ve licensed not only Warner Music’s catalogue, but that of every one of their associated sub-labels. From their blog:
So — quite a few new arrivals today, eh US members?
Over 10,000 albums, to be precise, a dizzying avalanche of stuff from the Warner Music Group. No matter your taste in music, there’s sure to be something here that appeals to you.
The increased catalogue will hopefully mean more subscribers, which in turn will mean more pairs of ears that can access all the music that RouteNote distributes to them… A small trickle down perhaps, but positive news none the less.
An interesting opinion piece from The Huffington Post on the future of the music industry, confirming our long held belief that the head-in-the sand, resistive approach from the big record labels when it comes to making their music more available online is untenable.
It’s unreasonable and naive to expect record labels to go down without a fight, but it’s no longer a matter of if — it’s a matter of when — they’ll embrace these changes. The smart ones will adapt their model toward online music — just as the New York Times and Washington Post have adapted to online news. It won’t be easy for them, but it’ll be great for musicians and music fans.
I applaud anyone who encourages the big players to be more open and forward thinking about facilitating legal channels of online music consumption like Spotify, Last.FM and MOG, and I urge you, gentle reader to get your music up online with these stores; not only are they great for attracting new fans, but they’re increasingly popular with advertisers, which means more revenue for you.
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)]
In order to encourage people to get their music online with us, and introduce new potential customers to our service, we thought we’d run a little competition. If you’re a solo musician or you’re in a band that has new music that needs to get out there and selling, all you need to do is add a comment to this blog post with the name of the band or artist and a link to the track that you think is their (or your) best. We’ll keep entries open until the 14th of December, and then we’ll judge all the tracks that have been entered. The top 3 according to our judges will be given completely free distribution to all of our partners stores during 2010 on any new releases they upload to RouteNote. No fees, no subscriptions, no back end cut, no strings – just access to our service completely free until 2011. The top 5 will get a feature and review on our blog, and we’re promoting this competition in collaboration with www.music-news.com, so you can expect to get their attention too. This competition is open only to artists and bands and music not already signed up to RouteNote.
As we published in this post, that’s certainly the standpoint of Swedish artist, Magnus Uggla and the Lady might well feel the same, based on the information in this post, saying that she was only paid a pittance by the Swedish performing rights society for a huge number of plays on the music streaming service Spotify:
According to a report today, Lady Gaga’s track “Poker Face” was one of the most popular tracks during a five month period on Spotify and was played more than a million times. So how much money does she get paid by STIM (the Swedish Performing Rights Society) for this massive achievement?
SEK 1150 – that’s around $167 or roughly 113 Euros.
But that’s not quite the whole story… The performing rights contribution splits out to $0.000167 a play, but so what? Lady G (or more likely her record label) will also be being paid directly by Spotify with a flat fee per play (a couple of pennies per track) and a chunk of the service’s ad revenue. Lady Gaga’s direct revenues from that many streams will be in the five figure $USD range, and the performing rights system probably does more to support their own bureaucratic infrastructure than it contributes towards paying her a sensible wage. It would be interesting to know exactly what proportion of their receipts is paid to artists, and what is spent on running the society, as well as why the PRS collects a fee for every track played on services like Spotify, even those of tracks by non-PRS-members.
Lily Allen has previously complained on Twitter “@citricsquid did you know the major own hold massive stakes in Spotify, and earn advertising revenue at yet another loss to the artist”that she’s not seeing any of the revenue from her Spotify plays, but this is likely to be because the majors have all bought shares in Spotify, and are both giving them an easy ride on the music licensing fees and taking their own substantial cut of anything that comes back. Lily Allen would do well to have a little faith in Spotify, given her well publicised feelingsagainst file sharing.
Of course, this diminished revenue wouldn’t be a problem if she’d signed her music up for digital distribution to with someone like RouteNote, who get the full per track rate, and only take 10% on the back end.
That said, the decision of the majors to support Spotify and other streaming services is a pragmatic one; if it is really the case that freemium services are reducing piracy and providing a way for labels to ‘monetize’ their catalogues online then it makes sense for the majors to be in on the ground floor and take advantage of future success, especially since they’re looking such ghastlyfinancials [pg. 33 for the headlines] in the face. Right, now that’s sorted we can all go back to wondering whether or not the Lady is a trap…
This is a small and versatile upright piano module with unique sound; neither a sample player, nor synthesized. It’s a hybrid technology, that combines both methods. This resulted in a great module size reduction and light CPU usage. If you’re looking for a professional grade Piano instrument VSTi, then this might be what you’re after. Download from their website or by clicking here.
RMXL is a re-release of a plugin previously included as a Computer Music exclusive. It is the best Richman synth to date with two totally independent sound sources and a wide variety of top class patches from electric-himalaya.com. All in all a very playable instrument. There’s also a raft of other synths and plugins free to download on Krakli.com
Deezer which is the French version of We7 has released a premium offering coupled with a few new product releases. Techcrunch UK reports:
Basically, the Deezer website, where users can listen to streaming music and create playlists, will remain free of charge while users who would like better sound quality (up to 320 kb/s) and no more advertisements can opt to pay €4.99 per month for Deezer HQ. The Premium offering (€9.99 / month) is the most interesting though, since it gives users the opportunity to download a full-fledged Adobe AIR desktop application and lets them gain access to their accounts through a wide range of mobile devices, including the iPhone, iPod Touch and multiple Android-run and Blackberry devices.
Deezer also commissioned a study that showed more than 80% of its user base was keen on getting mobile access, while 40% was interested in better sound quality. The combination of in-browser, desktop client and listening to music on the go via mobile, has now made Deezer a great Spotify competitor. This is the type of convergence I keep wishing every online music service would offer.
All those who love the beatnik side of Stephen Bishop, the albums of James Taylor – above all those prior to Flag – the masterly melodies of the Beatles, and the soft acoustic atmospheres of Ink’s Liv Taylor, simply have to listen to Let Me Ride. They will not be disappointed.
Max Tosi, originally from Cremona, a lengthy transit in Milan, but Sardinian by adoption (resident in Sassari for the last 11 years), gives the impression of having just stepped out of the Troubadour on a balmy evening in the mid-seventies with his live-act cassettes tucked under his arm. In effect the album Let Me Ride, although a studio album, has all the warmth and spontaneity of a confidential acoustic set recorded live in a small club. Priceless emotions for those who were brought up on bread and Mud Slide Slim or for those who for years have dreamed of travelling under a Californian sun towards San Buenaventura on the Fwy 101.
Genuine passion, love for the ballad, artisan attention to detail and simple instrumentation with light touches of strings and brass. Ten original compositions, ten instant soft-focus snapshots which, for better or for worse, appear to have been taken on an old-fashioned Polaroid. No bluffing, only the fragile, inexpressible charm of daily sensations, of little stories told with a delicate and at times almost naive touch. Review by Franco Fusilli
The not-so-cherubic singer has signed with music investment group Power Amp, a fund that specialises in “providing equitable finance for established artists to record and market new music.” The deal will provide her with the funds to record and produce a new album independently, in return for revenues from all aspects of Charlotte’s music career:
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