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,”
Record label Kudos has written a long and detailed post that goes over a lot of the things that we usually discuss on this blog – they make a few good points, and it’s nice to hear someone else thinking along the same lines as us. In brief they state that the music industry has got to work on changing the 95% of music downloads that don’t make them any money (i.e. Pirate downloads) to being legal, money generating downloads, and that the way to do that is to create software that delivers the service the consumer wants, and at the same time delivers revenue to the rights owners.
“Historically, technology was developed by The Producer, and served The Producer. Today it is often developed by The Consumer to serve only The Consumer.”
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.
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.
Ever clicked on an iTunes link and sworn under your breath as you wait for iTunes to open and demand that you download the latest version of the software before you’re allowed to hear the sample you were after? Well that doesn’t need to happen any more. The iTunes store has now become a lot more browser friendly, allowing you to view content using a normal web browser, rather than taking you to the shop page in their proprietary software. Content can be browsed by genre and artist, but is not yet searchable [EDIT - and you still have to open itunes to hear samples - very silly...]. A much quicker way of getting people to know about the music you’ve distributed through RouteNote.
You could always use our iTunes link maker, if you’re not unhappy with the old method… Just put your name in the search title and follow the steps through to get some HTML code that’s embeddable in your facebook, myspace or website.
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…
You might not be able to get a slot on From The Basement without greasing some major label palms, but BalconyTV is a channel that does daily sessions with unsigned and indie artists. So far they’ve had more than 8 million views across their bands, with The Script netting almost half a million plays as their most popular band. You can apply to play a session here, and then wend your way to either Dublin, London or Hamburg for a one day, live, unplugged recording session that they’ll chop up into a little video for you. Obviously if any of our distribution clients get on there we’d love to know about it so we can promote you on this blog!
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
Grooveshark are now firmly cemented as members of the free music for music fans fraternity along with others including We7, Deezer and obviously new giants Spotify. (we know there not all completely free!) With these guys being directly involved in the way music is changing, and likely being involved in someway with the big four record labels that everyone is quickly getting fed up with eventually go under, its only natural that they’d be knocking around The Future Of Music Summit.
Some interviews, be they amateur ones, are leaking its way to the net. Jack DeYoun (VP of label relations at Grooveshark) was mauled outside the summit by Scott Stead. The interview goes well until Jack reveals his favourite band…… so close.
disclosure: RouteNote is partners with Grooveshark.
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.
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