Today the radio 4 programme “today” debuted Radiohead’s new single Harry Patch(in loving memory of) who is the last remaining veteran of world war one.
The importance of the song is the main driving force behind it and the inspiration for it will remain a major influence for the many individuals who have been touched by Harry’s story, including Thom Yorke. Thom was inspired to write the sombre tribute after hearing Patch talk about his experiences of Passchendaele in an interview entitled “The last tommy”. The song is available for download only at Radiohead’s website an all proceeds will be donated to the Royal British Legion, a charity dedicated to former and serving British armed forces.
We are always looking for new markets for our artists and the gaming market has been on a list for a while now. Tap Tap Revenge is one of the biggest games on the iPhone and Tapulous the makers of the game have an ever growing network. Currently Tapulous has released Coldplay and NIN versions of their game in which they sell for about $4.99 in the iTunes app store. Tapulous has now announced that they have signed Universal Music Group to their roster and will be soon releasing more and more versions of Tap Tap Revenge.
Tapulous chief Bart Decrem admitted that purchases of premium versions of the game were quite modest. However, Decrem has been scaling the concept through the delivery of free apps, a familiar startup model that mostly pushes the monetization puzzle to a later date.
Lady Gaga is rumoured to be the first artist from Universal that will get their own game and im sure it will be released at about $4.99.
It would be great if Tapulous actually released lesser known artists in their free game and even becoming a tool for users to find new unsigned and independent artists, while at the same time releasing premium versions of better know mainstream artists.
A few days ago it was reported that eMusic has come to a deal with Sony to add their catalogue. However, there has been a lot of reaction from this new deal for eMusic, because this is the first major record label eMusic has added. Hypebot has a great preview of the service and then some interesting reactions that have been voiced on the eMusic message boards.
Jellybones: Thank you eMusic. Its been a good run here for me. I love emusic, been here over 5 years. But I can’t afford my tracks to be cut by 2/3 for the same price.
90 downloads will become 35. Sorry, not worth it for the selection. I can go buy a couple albums (maybe only 2 instead of 3) but I can get exactly what I want.
Kez RE: I feel sold out. It seems eMusic is enraptured with the dazzle of their future customer-trolls and have cast aside their loyal member base.
From the UK xtrev: As noted down in the bowels of the ‘Major label…’ thread, the new more expensive price plans have appeared on site today. Including Booster prices. Damn.
Don’t think I’ll be buying many more 50 track boosters at 20.99 UK pounds. That’s a HUGE increase over the previous 14.99. If this is an example of what it means to have major label content here, then frankly they can shove it.
btx: Except for very rare circumstances, I’m not particularly interested in giving my cash to the major labels, that’s why I come here. If it is going to cost me more for their presence [even if I should choose not to download their stuff], that may be the end for me.
d.w.: “Effective Jul 6, 2009, your plan will change to the new eMusic Plus plan which gives you 37 downloads for $14.99 every 30 days.
We’re sorry that we’ve had to retire your current plan, but we’re confident that you’ll find even more music to love among the many new additions to the music catalog. And of course, you can always choose a different plan by visiting the Plan Options page within Your Account.”
My current plan is (grandfathered) 65 tracks per month for $14.99. This means that your Sony deal results in a 100% per track price increase over what I’m paying currently.
I appreciate(?) that you’ll be adding a lot of music from major labels that I could frankly not give a crap about (Alicia Keys — really?), but literally halving the amount of tracks I get on my current plan is a bit much to take. I’ve been a subscriber since 2000, but I am seriously considering canceling at this point.
eMusic is one of our great partners here at RouteNote and I would have rather seen the service stay with the indie industry and not attach themselves to the major labels, but now it seems like there is a new opportunity in the market for another indie service.
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.
7Digital and Spotify have announced a new partnership that will see 7Digital purchasing links in the Spotify platform. This partnership is aimed to help Spotify increase revenues in this very difficult economic situation that is heavily affecting online advertising revenues.
Beginning with the UK, France, Spain and Germany, the deal enables Spotify users to purchase 320kbps MP3 downloads from 7Digital’s 6M track catalog along with a selection of FLAC downloads. Sweden, Norway and Finland will follow in a few weeks. In the future, users will be able to purchase playlists that have been created within Spotify at a discounted price. Future improvements will include closer integration including one click downloads.
The Spotify deal follows a similar 7Digital partnership with open source media player Songbird using 7digital’s API which allows integration with 7digital’s catalog and commissions on sales.
There have been a lot of reports over the weekend about the demise of SpiralFrog. SpiralFrog was an ad supported music streaming and download service that never really took off.
Having raised as much as $12 million in VC and debt funding, the company made a splash in August 2006 (after 2 years in operations) when Universal Music made their entire music catalog available for free download through SpiralFrog, joined by EMI a month after. About a year after, SpiralFrog started handing out private beta invitations (what took them so long?)
Attorneys representing defunct music service SpiralFrog have notified investors not to expect any returns. Whatever money comes from liquidating assets will go to a group that loaned the company an “amount exceeding $34 million.”
Is this going to be the start of more ad supported music download and streaming services moving towards the deadpool? I can see Qtrax is going to now have a lot of trouble is this economic environment and Im sure they will be the next to be closing.
Here at RouteNote we were lucky enough to get some great press over the weekend from Digital Noise. Digital Noise is a digital music news site from CNet (owners of Download.com, TV.com and more).
CD Baby and Tunecore already offer digital distribution through iTunes and other stores, but both of them charge you money whether you make a sale or not. In contrast, U.K.-based RouteNote charges you nothing until you make a sale, at which point they take a 10 percent cut of whatever the store pays out.
Specifics: CDBaby charges you a one-time set-up fee of $35 (which covers setting up a store for physical CDs as well), then takes 9 percent of digital download revenues. TuneCore, which does digital distribution only (no CDs) charges you $20 a year for each album they stock, but takes no cut. So on a straight numbers basis, RouteNote’s a better deal than CD Baby for digital-only distribution, and a better deal than TuneCore if you expect to sell low volumes of downloads. Of course, there are a lot of other factors to consider, like customer service and speed of submission to iTunes and the other stores, but RouteNote looks like it’s worth checking out.
A lot of people get in touch with us to ask how many digital stores we distribute music to, and what proportion of the digital music market they represent. We also hear comments on the relatively small number of people we deal with in comparison to the huge lists of partners at some of our competitors, e.g. CDbaby,Emubands, IODA…(without mentioning the duplication in the last two).
The simple truth is that while a long list of digital music stores might look good, beyond the top 3 or 4 retailers it makes very little difference to overall sales how many your music’s in. It’s fairly common knowledge that iTunes is the biggest player in the market, but the scale of their dominance is pretty staggering. Neilsen (the ratings and market reporting firm) reports total US music sales of 1,513 million units in 2008, with 1070 million of those sales being digital downloads. That’s a billion digital music downloads across the entire US.
In 2008, across all territories, iTunes sold more than Two Billion tracks.
Apple iTunes Store Music Sales
Date
Tracks Sold (Millions)
01/08/2004
100
16/12/2004
200
02/03/2005
300
10/05/2005
400
18/07/2005
500
10/01/2006
850
23/02/2006
1,000
12/09/2006
1,500
10/01/2007
2,000
09/04/2007
2,500
31/07/2007
3,000
15/01/2008
4,000
19/06/2008
5,000
06/01/2009
6,000
Excuse the horrid old excel graph, I’m still running Office ’03…
It’s difficult to get a believable estimate for the size of the global digital music market, but given that the USA is the biggest single economy by a long way (the whole of the EU only just beats it in the CIA factbook at $14.98 trillion to $14.58 trillion), you begin to get a picture of how much of a monopoly iTunes has. Their competitors are of a different order: Amazon weighed in at 27 million digital tracks sold in the first six months of 2008, and the CEO of eMusic (David Pakman) estimated that Amazon have got about 4%-5% of the US music market, which going from Neilsen’s estimates puts them at about 48,150,000 tracks annually. Pakman also claims an approx. 10%-15% market share for eMusic, with 7 million downloads sold monthly (7*12 = 84).
By browsing eMusic’s sales milestone press releases, you can plot a rough course for their sales:
eMusic Digital Music Sales
Date
Tracks Sold (Millions)
01/09/2004
0
01/12/2004
3
01/12/2006
100
25/09/2007
160
14/04/2008
200
20/11/2008
250
I’ll spare you another ugly graph. eMusic has sold 250 million tracks since it’s relaunch in 2004, and Amazon’s only been going for about a year now, 300 million tracks let’s say, which pales beside iTunes’ 6 billion total sales.
One can argue with the estimates, but the main thrust of my argument is hopefully becoming clear. A conservative 15% market share between Amazon and eMusic, along with iTunes’ >80% doesn’t leave more than 5% for any other players in the USA: with just those three selling your music for you online, you’ve got 95% of the market covered. It’s not that the remaining 5% isn’t worth catering to, but the law of diminishing returns kicks in, and customers in the last few percentiles get harder and harder to chase down, especially given the plethora of blossoming and failing little music shops that appear and dissappear. We concentrate our efforts on the vendors that matter.
P.S.
The controversial bulk of music discovery and consumption in the electronic wilderness, outside the paid-for enclosure, is happening on torrent sites like the embattled Pirate Bay, and the more respectable Limewire and Mininova, and promoting RouteNote artists on these channels is something we’re looking into. Ubiquitous innovator Trent Reznor or NIN positively encourages people to download his music from P2P networks, in order to drive sales of his ‘premium’ paid for content.
Have you ever wondered how much iTunes account for digital sales online? One of our competitors CD Baby has published their 2008 results which shows that iTunes currently accounts for over 82% of their total digital revenues. This makes me wonder why artists are really keen to get their music in as many places as possible, instead of just focusing on the top retail points and building a base around them and their users.
RouteNote has been lucky enough to partner with Mininova to offer some of our video content to the 100 million people who use the site every month. Mininova is the worlds largest bittorrent client in which receives over 800 million pageviews every month.
One of the first videos we have added to Mininova is The Peoples String Foundation – Red Dress Woman in Black. The video can be currently viewed on our YouTube channel, but if you want to download the video to place on your computer or ipod here is the link to the torrent on Mininova.
Enjoy!
In the future RouteNote will be adding more videos and other content to Mininova and other bittorrent sites to help drive promotion of our artists. Stay tuned for more freebies coming soon.
The importance of the song is the main driving force behind it and the inspiration for it will remain a major influence for the many individuals who have been touched by Harry’s story, including Thom Yorke. Thom was inspired to write the sombre tribute after hearing Patch talk about his 
experiences of Passchendaele in an interview entitled “The last tommy”. The song is available for download only at Radiohead’s website an all proceeds will be donated to the Royal British Legion, a charity dedicated to former and serving British armed forces.
We are always looking for new markets for our artists and the gaming market has been on a list for a while now. Tap Tap Revenge is one of the biggest games on the iPhone and 
