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.

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• Emusic Signs Warner Music Deal – January 12, 2010
• Digital Music Store Focus – Napster 2.0 < – October 15, 2009
• Digital Music Store Focus – iTunes – October 14, 2009
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• Digital Music Store Focus – iMesh – October 12, 2009

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.

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• Bid To Buy The Orchard Raised To $2 By eMusic Owners – January 15, 2010
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• Hulu, Vevo, Spotify – Embattled EMI embraces new revenue streams – November 19, 2009
• Robbie Williams new Album for Free! – November 4, 2009

Thanks, and good luck!

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• Emusic Signs Warner Music Deal – January 12, 2010
• Hulu, Vevo, Spotify – Embattled EMI embraces new revenue streams – November 19, 2009
• Bid To Buy The Orchard Raised To $2 By eMusic Owners – January 15, 2010
• Digital Piracy Round 2 – Appropriate Damages – January 7, 2010
• Spotify, MOG, Streaming, Piracy and the Future of Digital Music – November 13, 2009

Click here for a larger view.

Related Articles

• Digital Music Stores Compared – February 19, 2009
• Why Pick RouteNote? Sheer Success – September 23, 2009
• Tesco Has The New U2 Album for Only £3.97 – March 6, 2009
• RouteNote Launches To The Public: Welcome! – April 16, 2008
• Upload Tool Launched! – December 1, 2009

RouteNote was launched with some major online retailers already on board, such as iTunes and eMusic. RouteNote works on the basis that we offer free distribution services to artists from all over the world. Artists head to RouteNote and can choose to upload their music to any of our partners (iTunes, Emusic, Amazon Mp3, Last.fm and more). Artists then receive 90% of all revenues derived from these partners in which is paid monthly.

So why choose RouteNote over our competitors?

1. No upfront fees
2. No monthly costs
3. Artists keep 100% ownership of their music
4. Artists receive 90% of all net revenues
5. Free UPC and ISRC codes
6. Artists from Anywhere in the world are accepted

RouteNote is a very service orientated business and customer service is what we pride ourselves on, because working closely with our artists means that we have the opportunity to really push and drive their sales which of course is our aim. RouteNote makes sure that artists have their music in all of the relevant places, and knows that the contemporaneous placement of music within these all these services is important, so we provide a speedy 3-4 week service to get your tracks from uploaded to live.

Providing great customer service has really help our artists get on to the service fast and more efficiently, which has really helped them to focus on driving sales. Our best example recently is that Megassus (a RouteNote contributor) held the number 1, 4 and 8th positions in the New age genre within eMusic.

Related Articles

• Win A Year’s Free Distribution With RouteNote – November 25, 2009
• Upload Tool Launched! – December 1, 2009
• Music Retail: The Rise of Digital – November 3, 2009
• Tesco Has The New U2 Album for Only £3.97 – March 6, 2009
• Digital Music Stores Compared – February 19, 2009

I know that iTunes has over 80% of the digital music download market at the moment, but very slowly eMusic and Amazon Mp3 are closing the gap. eMusic is known for having the worlds largest independent catalogue, while Amazon Mp3 are the new players on the block who are making great strides in a short period of time.

So if you want to get your music onto eMusic and Amazon Mp3 for free then head over to our registration page and signup.

Related Articles

• Win A Year’s Free Distribution With RouteNote – November 25, 2009
• Bid To Buy The Orchard Raised To $2 By eMusic Owners – January 15, 2010
• Emusic Signs Warner Music Deal – January 12, 2010
• Top 100 albums of the decade – November 19, 2009
• Music Retail: The Rise of Digital – November 3, 2009

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.

Related Articles

• Digital Music Stores Compared – February 19, 2009
• Music Retail: The Rise of Digital – November 3, 2009
• Amazon Mp3 Launches UK Store on Wednesday – April 28, 2009
• Spotify and 7Digital Partner To Offer Direct Download Links – March 30, 2009
• SpiralFrog Goes Under – March 23, 2009

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.

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.

Related Articles

• iTunes Accounts for 82% of Total Digital Revenues for CD Baby – February 18, 2009
• RouteNote Launches To The Public: Welcome! – April 16, 2008
• Music Retail: The Rise of Digital – November 3, 2009
• Digital Noise (CNet Music Site) Promotes our Services – February 23, 2009
• Amazon Mp3 Has Finally Launched Its UK Music Download Store – December 3, 2008

Welcome to RouteNote. RouteNote has launched today into public beta, with its distribution offering.

What RouteNote offers:

• Retain 100% Ownership of your tracks
• Non-exclusive
• Worldwide Exposure
• No Signup Fees
• Receive 90% from all download sales
• It wont stop you from signing up to a record label in the future
• Forward looking partnerships and marketing expertise

It only takes about 5 min to sign up and you can have all your music heading over to some of the worlds largest online stores.

Related Articles

• Digital Music Stores Compared – February 19, 2009
• Digital Music Distributors Compared – February 24, 2009
• iTunes Growth Is Still On The Rise – Are You Part Of The Movement – August 28, 2008
• Win A Year’s Free Distribution With RouteNote – November 25, 2009
• Music Retail: The Rise of Digital – November 3, 2009