Christmas seems to be fast approaching and you only have another week or so to get your Christmas Songs into RouteNote to have them online by Christmas. RouteNote is offering an amazing service for Christmas, which will hopefully get your track into the hard drives of many thousands of people all over the world.
If you have a Christmas Song you want to distribute then make sure you get it into us as soon as possible.
I have been noticing around the net that a lot of artists have been trying to find a quality solution to get their music added to Spotify for Free. RouteNote is the leading digital music distributor in the UK and we allow artists to add their music to the worlds largest music stores and streaming services for Fre (no upfront fees) and the artist keeps 85% of the royalties. Spotify is one of the services we have partnered with and they are providing some great promotion and revenues for artists.
If you want to get your music onto Spotify for free just check out RouteNote.
Nettwerk Music Group has announced they they are moving their US distribution to Alternative Distribution Alliance (ADA).
From the press release:
Ric Arboit, President, Nettwerk Records says, “Nettwerk has always been about releasing music that we love, and with that comes a strong focus on artist development. We wanted a U.S. distribution partner with not only a similar philosophy, but also one that distributes like-minded labels, and we found that with ADA. We are thrilled to announce this partnership.”
“Our goal at ADA is to partner with independent labels that have a strong culture and sense of mission, and to bring those labels an unmatched set of services that enable them to grow and manage their businesses more effectively,” said Mitchell Wolk, President of ADA. “For more than two decades Nettwerk has proven itself to be one of the premiere companies in the business and we are looking forward to this new opportunity to build and enhance their already impressive ability at finding and developing some of the industry’s most influential indie artists.”
Here at RouteNote we have been keeping a close eye on the situation with OK Go and EMI. Now that OK Go have been able to get out of their EMI contract they are in the process of setting up their own label. The new label is dubbed Paracadute Records.
Paracadute has also announced that they will be getting distribution through RED, owned by Sony Music.
The full situation is as follows: EMI Music holds the rights to the older catalog, though the latest EMI release – Of The Blue Colour of the Sky – is now getting a fresh re-release under Paracadute/RED in July.
Its very interesting to see that OK Go choose a Sony related service, and I’m sure EMI aren’t going to be very happy.
Brit Award winners Florence and The Machine have released a new video for their track ‘Dog Days Are Over’, which is available for your viewing pleasure on their website. A strange mix of Barbarella and Jane Austen, seasoned with Monty Python animation and Ziggy Stardust makeup. The track is bearing up pretty well under the usual vampiric draining by pop radio stations that a Brit win usually entails – by the way, did anyone ever hear from that Speech Debelle girl again? I guess not all music awards are created equal… shame that talent needs so much money to swim against the tide of marketing.
They’ve not announced a specific date, but Business Week are carrying this story, in which Senior Vice President Paul Brown claims they’re in talks with various ISP’s, web hosting companies and mobile providers to co-ordinate service provision in the States before the year is out:
“We’re buying server space in random parts of the states and there are licensing discussions too,” Brown said “But they are going fine because we’re in a long-term partnership with the labels and publishers.”
They are also in discussions to port their smartphone app, that’s currently on Android and the iPhone onto the BlackBerry and Palm Inc. smartphones – a small but significant expansion of their customer appeal. Expansion into the USA will see a big jump in Spotify’s user numbers, which will necessitate improvement in their per-user revenue figures unless they are to start losing huge amounts of money. It’s for this reason that they have been restricting signups in Europe, so perhaps there’s a new model or a magic bullet, or perhaps they’re just bullish about the steady increase in their ad revenues being able to fully fund a free user by the time they’re ready to launch in the new territory.
Either way, if you’re an indie musician, sign up with RouteNote and we’ll get your music on Spotify for you ahead of their expansion.
Guy Hands and his team at the high flying venture capital firm Terra Firma have been chewing sour grapes ever since their purchase of recording giant EMI for £2.4 billion. They have been in court with their lenders Citibank over bad advice during the sale of the label, and have been practically walking on water to meet the huge cash demand of the interest payments on their gigantic loan (although they stopped short of selling off the Abbey Rd. Studios to get a cash fix). Now they are again scrabbling around to find £120 million to plug a covenant breach on the same loan, and a deal is in the offing from WMG to buy the still-profitable music publishing arm of EMI, an asset it’s been coveting over the garden fence for decades. Any bid for the £1.2 billion publishing arm is probably going to be made after EMI have cleared or defaulted on their next interest payment, in the first case, making an offer to EMI and Terra Firma, and in the second, talking to their creditor Citi if the company goes into receivership.
Spotify currently boasts 7 million users, all of them in Europe. Not bad for a product that was only released in October 2008 – this figure does only relate to the number of people on their free service, but their £10 a month premium service is also gaining traffic at a remarkable rate; they had “more than 250,000″ premium users on 23rd Jan ’10, and are now boasting 320,000 paid subscribers, (as of the 17th March ’10), and increase of 28% in under 3 months, and an extra £8,400,000 a year into the coffers. Spotify still needs to up their percentages though, according to UMG’s [Universal Music Group's] SVP [Senior Vice President] Rob Wells [and they would know, because they've taken shares in the business], they need to have around 10%-12% of their users as premium subscribers [they're currently at about 5%] to have a viable business in the long term. This might change as more and more advertising dollars go online though – as both Spotify’s CEO Daniel Ek and industry analysts Kantar Media are saying:
[Table via TechCrunch's article on the same]. Other interesting facts are that 15% to 18% of the Swedish population use Spotify – and the Swedish music industry’s revenues are up, and that Spotify’s p2p based system is actually using more interwebs than the whole nation of Sweden. There are rumours of a Spotify set-top box and/or home stereo system, a bit like that Sonos thing, but running off your Spotify premium account.
Other signs of Spotify’s ambition came from comments about Apple – Ek described them as having a freemium model like Spotify’s, as everyone (in his opinion) downloads a lot of free stuff and then buys the stuff they really like on iTunes:
“The vast majority of people’s libraries are free from Limewire or trading through friends. And then there’s a small portion of tracks that they’ve bought… I really believe that if music could be legally available on any device that you wanted… I think the music industry would be radically bigger than what it is today”.
He also thinks that Apple will change the way that iTunes works, to allow remote access from anywhere to your iTunes music account on a cloud: “People want to share, to access independently. I think it makes a lot of sense for them to do something in that area.”
Ad-supported music and digital content service Guvera has set the date for going live in the States as 30th March. The service, named for the bloody-handed revolutionary icon Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara [wiki here, tl;dr we should all strive for personal fulfilment and be nice communists, but sometimes it's ok to shoot people in the head if they betray you] – aims to instigate a ‘revolution’ in the media industry by getting advertisers to pay for content delivered to consumers, who have chosen the advertiser whose branding they find least offensive/interruptive. This may not be quite the paradigm shift that they seem to think, but their beta service has been up and running for a couple of months in Australia now, and has been successful enough for them to roll out the full scale launch. They have deals in place with Universal Music Group, EMI Music and IODA offering consumers ‘free but paid for’ legal downloads from their full music libraries, but concerns abound as to whether they’ll be able to pay for them in the long term and on the grand scale that they hope for. Another streaming service in the States means that Spotify, bogged down making their platform profitable in Europe, will find the marketplace that bit more crowded if and when they finally get their stall laid out in the US, but they will have had the headstart in refining the user experience and gathering advertisers to their service. There is a future for online ad-supported music streaming, the appetite is strongly apparent, but it will be a hotly contested race to become the dominant provider, and Guvera have yet to prove themselves against the competition.
In an interview with the LA Times, the guitar burning rock idol’s stepsister Janie Hendrix said that not only will there be a new album released this year, named “Valleys of Neptune” (based on recordings made in the early months of 1969), but that much more of his back catalogue has been licensed to feature in the next version of the game Rock Band. For some this is enough to suggest a full out branding exercise after the manner in which the Beatles were splashed all over the previous edition.
The game’s creators, Harmonix, were more reserved in their statement to Joystiq;
“While we have not made any official announcements regarding Jimi Hendrix and Rock Band, we are excited to say that we are in discussions to bring more of his music to our platform,”
