iTunes is heading for it’s 10 billionth track sold, and has launched a promotion to encourage people to get their credit cards out. If you’re the purchaser of the 10,000,000,000th track, then that nice Mr. Jobs will post you a gift card worth $10,000 to spend in the iTunes store. Interestingly, you don’t actually need to buy any music to be eligible to win the ten thousand dollar prize; you can get a free sweepstake entry by filling out a form here, which should count the same as a song purchase if your entry gets processed immediately after the 99,999,999,999th track is sold. You can keep an eye on the track sales ticker on the iTunes homepage, and put in up to 25 free entries a day, or just log in and buy a huge pile of songs near the time. I’ll be entering, but unfortunately they don’t sell hardware on the iTunes store, so my iPad will have to wait until Christmas. Oh, and if you happened to buy from one of the artists that RouteNote has distributed music to iTunes for, then we’d be really pleased.
Hewlett Packard, one of the biggest desktop manufacturers, has announced its plans to operate a music download and streaming supscription service called MusicStation, operated in conjunction with a company called Omnifone and installed by default on all of their new PC’s, desktops and laptops alike. This service looks set to enter the market and compete directly with services like Emusic and Spotify, charging a monthly subscription, variable by territory, but coming in at around $14.50 USD. The service will allow subscribers to stream and listen to as many songs as they like, and keep 10 DRM free downloads forever, even after they cancel their subscription.
The User Interface will have to be good to justify the premuim over Spotify’s sub price, although the ability to keep downloads is an incentive. The service seems a sort of halfway house between the bigger success stories of the nascent digital music market, iTunes, Emusic, Spotify… Even though it’s not a particularly innovative product, HP have a similar advantage in that they can build hardware that interfaces smoothly with their software, and get their product in the hands of anyone who buys their machines, just as Apple do with their desktops. That said, Microsoft’s Zune failed to make the impact they’d hoped, despite the fact that it had some nice functional advantages over the iPod and their software runs on the vast majority of PC’s worldwide. Given the facility with which software can be obtained, I think HP’s project will live or die by the quality of its interface, and keeping up with Spotify on that front will be a hard task.
Tired of missing out on gigs from your favourite artists? Buying tickets at a premium after you miss the official site runs out? Trawling through Myspace pages and gig listings to find out who’s playing where in the next year, only to find venues have sold out before you’ve even heard a gig is on?
Songkick will solve all these problems for you. They have a plugin for iTunes and for Last.FM that will analyse your music library or your top listened bands and compile a list of when and where they’re gigging in the foreseeable future, and will send you alerts when gigs come up close to you for your listened artists. They also provide direct links to ticket vendors, with a price comparison for each, so you’ll always know first, and never pay over the odds for a ticket.
From the artist’s perspective, you can also add concerts to the online database, so that your listeners are automatically updated when you list new gigs. Just make sure that we distribute your music to last.fm when you sign it up to our digital music distribution service, so that your music can be discovered on their streaming service.
Valleywag have been running a cheeky competition to try and ferret out evidence of the rumoured Apple iTablet – a more or less hypothetical XXL version of the iPod Touch. Far from being just an accessory to your desktop, this is supposed to be more like a halfway house between your iPod/smartphone and a Laptop computer. A portable monitor with a touch screen interface and no keyboard (although it will likely have plenty of connectors to attach peripherals) that will run modestly sized applications and interface with files that have been saved on an online ‘cloud’ like the ones Google and others have recently announced.
Apple haven’t taken kindly to their offering cash prizes of up to $100,000 for photos or demos of the project, and have sent over a stroppy letter demanding that Valleywag take down the competition post. A bad move, as VW have taken this as confirmation of the project’s existence in a ‘the lady doth protest too much’ way. As a consolation prize for what they consider to be a confirmation not conforming to their stated criteria, they’ve sent the lawyer a £25 Zune marketplace voucher. [smileyface.jpg]
Apple confirmed on Friday that it has bought music streaming/download service Lala – the same that recently signed deals with Facebook and Google provide a music streaming through their platforms. Lala currently has 100,000 users signed up, and revenues of about $10,000,000 – their catalogue of available tracks is around 8 million, while iTunes has 11 million. The purchase is clearly not a question of expanding iTunes catalogue or user base by wooing Lala users, so iTunes can only really be interested in Lala’s streaming technology. This purchase would seem to herald iTunes launching a music streaming service to compete more directly with up and coming providers like MOG and Spotify. Dark clouds on the horizon as the download giant looms over the intended territory of new streaming propositions.
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.
We posted a couple of times about the upcoming release of the Black Keys’ Blackroc project. It hit the stores (well, some of them) last Friday, and had gone straight to the top of iTunes’ hip-hop chart. Ian Rogers of Topspin media analyses the way that they’ve gone about managing their album release on his music marketing/management blog, Fisfulayen – click here to go take a look.
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.
The date for Them Crooked Vultures debut album is creeping up and the bands sexy promotion campaign continues in the style of generosity. iTunes is host to a free download from the band named “Mind Eraser, No Chaser”.
The first official release was the the single that came out last week, “New Fang”. The free track is another little riff machine that was unleashed at the bands short burst of dates in the US and Europe this summer. With catchy guitar and an even catchier chorus, fingers crossed the album is consistent. TCV will begin a tour of the west coast (US) starting mid November, with the self titled album being released on the same day, the 17th.
iTunes is heading for it’s 10 billionth track sold, and has launched a promotion to encourage people to get their credit cards out. If you’re the purchaser of the 10,000,000,000th track, then that nice Mr. Jobs will post you a gift card worth $10,000 to spend in the iTunes store. Interestingly, you don’t actually need to buy any music to be eligible to win the ten thousand dollar prize; you can get a free sweepstake entry by filling out a form here, which should count the same as a song purchase if your entry gets processed immediately after the 99,999,999,999th track is sold. You can keep an eye on the track sales ticker on the iTunes homepage, and put in up to 25 free entries a day, or just log in and buy a huge pile of songs near the time. I’ll be entering, but unfortunately they don’t sell hardware on the iTunes store, so my iPad will have to wait until Christmas. Oh, and if you happened to buy from one of the artists that RouteNote has distributed music to iTunes for, then we’d be really pleased.
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