Yoko Ono yesterday told Beatles fans “not to hold your breathe”, waiting for the most popular and demanded music collection of all time to be available on iTunes. By doing so she alienates herself even further from the people who have paid for her luxurious lifestyle for such a long time, and demonstrates yet again what a naive and contemptible ass she really is.
I suppose I should qualify the two defamatory statements above; she is naive for not understanding web culture, which is common for someone of her age. If someone has a computer and an iPod and wants to buy the entire Beatles back catalogue, but when arriving at their computer cannot find the said music on the iTunes store, what will they do? Well of course, the more tech savvy amongst us will know how easy it is to find the music and exactly where to find it, as the below soundcloud file will show you.
The less tech-able will probably ask a friend, or ask google. They might google something like “how do I get Beatles music on my iPod?” Go on Yoko, type that into google, you thick bitch.
Of course, the most irritating part of this whole affair is that at heart, she knows people will carry on dishing out the cash to buy the remastered box-sets. They will do this year after year after year, because they like the music that Yoko’s husband made with a few of his friends. Hence, she is deserving of our universal contempt.
Well, here is a free Beatles song for you all to enjoy. I know it’s not a particularly good one, but at least whilst listening to it we can all feel happy that we have taken a couple of coins from Yoko’s money mountain, a mountain that she probably sits atop and cackles from whilst we all make her rich.
I hope she holds her breathe. I hope she holds it for a really long time.
Apple have announced that more than two million people have applied for tickets for next month’s iTunes Festival in London.
“We’ve already had over 2 million tickets applied for, at an average of 100,000 every day,” says Oliver Schusser, senior director of iTunes Europe. “This year’s iTunes Festival is looking like our most popular ever and we can’t wait for the Scissor Sisters to kick it off in three weeks time.”
Out of these two million people there are only 60,000 tickets for teh 31-night gigfest, which takes place at the Roudhouse in Camden. Key artists include Scissor Sisters and Faithless.
There are a lot of artists who want to know how to use iTunes to increase their sales on iTunes. Here at RouteNote we have a lot of artists who do amazingly well from their sales on iTunes, and a top seller has provided the musicthinktank with some amazing tips on how to sell more on iTunes.
With iTunes you really need to promote yourself within the walls of iTunes, and this goes a long way to help you sell and grow your fan based across other sites.
Here is a step by step process on how to promote yourself within iTunes. Please remember that this does take a lot of time, but overall can really get some great results.
Step 1 – Sign up to iTunes and Buy Some Music
The first thing you should do is signup and buy some music (your and your friends), this gets you familiar with the process of buying, plus this will come in handy when you ask your fans to buy your tracks later.
Step 2 – Create at Least 5 profile accounts
Did you know that with each credit card that you register with iTunes you get 5 separate accounts? iTunes designed it this way so families in one household can all use one card.
All profiles are kept completely seperate and not interconnected. One of the profiles will be use by you as your main account, but you can use the other 4 accounts to help promote yourself.
TIP: While you are creating these profiles: Think about your target audience – who are they? Older dudes that like prog rock, or teenagers that like Britney Spears? Create profiles that would fit the types of people who like your music. Choose a name for each profile so they each have an individual personality. Give them distinct personalities and even imagine where they might be from.
Step 3 – Review Other Artists
With each profile – individually begin to review other people’s music. You definitely want to review three or four other artists that have nothing to do with you or your genre so choose some of the artists that have influenced you or artists that you like and create some reviews.
Step 4 – Create iMixes
You will need to create 2 categories of iMixes:
1: iMixes that have nothing to do with you and your music
Examples:
Best of Madonna
Great local bands from your hometown
Best of Bob Marley
Best of the 1970’s
2. iMixes that INCLUDE YOUR OWN MUSIC
Create mixes that include your own tracks with other complimentary tracks (artists you get compared to and who you are influenced by that sound good when played next to your songs). When you create iMixes think of yourself as a DJ or a curator and piece together thoughtful lists.
TIP: Add some of the top sellers from each week in your genre and style as buyers will already be looking for the top sellers when they come to iTunes.
TIP: You should create an iMix at least one time per week per account.
Step 5 – Vote for iMixes
Make sure you vote on as many iMixes as possible. Vote for your own iMixes using all of your profiles.
COOL: iMixes that begin to pick up votes rise to the top where other buyers will begin to respond to them and purchase your iMixes.
A Note about iMix voting: People who are key users who are also heavily promoting their own music sometimes can be competitive. They may try to vote your iMixes down so that the iMixes that they have created rise to the top.
What my friend says about this: Being malicious on iTunes is awful. Don’t give other people bad reviews. Stay away from this type of negative behavior. Just focus on your own voting and contributions.
Step 6 – Master iMix Sandwiching
When you create an iMix, you want to sandwich yourself between hot chart-toppers in your genre, and add artists that already have five-star reviews.
For each iMix, make it at least 20 songs, but you can go to 40 or 50 songs. To stay on top of the charts for your iMix, you must get the most votes and the most stars.
TIP: Don’t forget to vote for other people’s iMixes so it looks like you are well-rounded.
This is where registering different credit cards and different personalities so you can actually log in and vote for yourself comes in handy.
Step 7 – Remove Unpopular iMixes & Update Them
If your iMix fals below three stars you should take your iMix down from iTunes, add some new tracks to it, and then add it again as an updated iMix.
It will take a few hours for your updated iMix to show back up into the iTunes profiles, but you don’t want to have a poorly rated iMix sitting in the iTunes system with your music in it.
How To Update an iMix: In order to update an I-Mix: Click on the arrow on iTunes. Then click on “update,” and add some new tracks,
TIP: Don’t rename your iMix
iMixes are good for a whole year, so you want to make sure that you start voting, when it goes back up. It takes between 6 to 12 hours for a newly edited or a new iMix to show up.
Here’s The Wrap Up:
For each profile you create: Their iMixes to match their personality:
1. Create then wait for your iMix to show up.
2. Log in as each of your different reviewers and users.
3. Vote five stars from each of the profiles you have created.
4. Start watching your music sell
5. Go in two times per week and create new iMixes.
6. After a while to stay in the most recent, you must continue to make new iMixes. Vote, vote and vote.
7. Remember, you must log in and submit votes for each of the iMixes with each of your separate accounts and many sepearte times. This is the most time consuming part of the process, but if you do this, the rewards and the sales will pay off deeply
8. Log in and vote for: Was this review helpful? And click yes per account. This will help your iMix move up the charts.
9. When you make an iMix, don’t only include the chart toppers, but also include what appeals to you as a listener and what the fans of this iMix might actually like.
10. Remember, you are creating a useful contribution to the iTunes community. The key is make iMixes on Mondays because on Tuesdays the new release schedule will kick in and that’s when your iMixes will show up
Warner Music Group have announced their numbers for the first quarter of 2010. Warner Music Group cut its loss to $25 million compared to $68 million a year ago. Recorded music sales were down 5.5% year-on-year to $534 million, but global digital sales were up 11.2% to $189 million, with the UK singled out as a particularly strong market.
Digital sales now account for 30.1% of WMG’s total income. CEO Edgar Bronfman praised Apple – “No-one’s gotten very rich betting against Steve Jobs – and I don’t want to be the first to do it” – although he refused to speculate on whether it’s about to launch a subscription model for iTunes.
Apple has just announced their iTunes Festival dates for 2010, plus their headline acts. The fourth annual month-long event where artists play in the name of music and the iTunes Store.
Like iTunes Festival 2007, 2008, and 2009, Apple has lined up more than 60 bands, one or two of which will play intimate shows each night at Camden’s Roundhouse in London. The performances will be recorded and sold in iTunes Stores all over the world once all is said and… sung.
This time around, however, Apple is playing coy with the artist lineup. For now, only the first three dates are announced: Scissor Sisters play July 1, Tony Bennett on July 2, and Ozzy Osbourne on July 3. The rest of the dates and artists will be announced over time via Apple’s iTunes Festival accounts on Facebook and Twitter.
The shows are free, but the only way to grab one of 25 tickets for each night is to win them. Contests will be launched from the iTunes Festival Tickets page, so you have to apply to participate in each one. Good luck, music lovers.
There are so many bands out there that want to get their music up for sale on iTunes, but haven’t found a way of doing so. About 3 years ago getting your music picked up by a digital music distribution company was pretty much impossible unless you were signed by a major record label. We’ve been working to change that. If you’re new to our site, or you’ve never heard of us before, then we’re here to help you finally reach your goal of selling your music professionally on the worlds largest music stores.
We at RouteNote are always trying to help as many artists as we can. Unlike some other services, we know that providing artists with good customer relations, useful tools and an affordable service is the way forward. If you want to get your music onto iTunes, eMusic, Spotify and more, then make sure you register for an account, download our easy to use music upload tool, and get your music selling online.
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.”
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.
Yoko Ono yesterday told Beatles fans “not to hold your breathe”, waiting for the most popular and demanded music collection of all time to be available on iTunes. By doing so she alienates herself even further from the people who have paid for her luxurious lifestyle for such a long time, and demonstrates yet again what a naive and contemptible ass she really is.
There are a lot of artists who want to know how to use iTunes to increase their sales on iTunes. Here at RouteNote we have a lot of artists who do amazingly well from their sales on iTunes, and a top seller has provided the 
Warner Music Group have announced their numbers for the first quarter of 2010. Warner Music Group cut its loss to $25 million compared to $68 million a year ago. Recorded music sales were down 5.5% year-on-year to $534 million, but global digital sales were up 11.2% to $189 million, with the UK singled out as a particularly strong market.
