Archive for: last fm
A couple of days ago we wrote a quick article informing our artists that we will no longer be supporting Last.fm through our platform. Artists can now sign up directly to the Last.fm service and receive royalties, thus RouteNote was not required in this process.
I would like to thank all the press who picked up on this story:
Hypebot – RoutNote is pulling it’s clients tracks from music site Last.fm because it says royalty payments have been too low.
Digital Music News – CBS has experienced difficulty ramping premiums and creating a meaningful revenue picture.
Billboard Biz – RouteNote artists are free to join Last.fm on their own.
Last.fm has a great service and we really encourage our artists to join the service directly, then they can use the service for promotional purposes and earn more revenues.
Here at RouteNote we have been growing at a great pace with now over 2,800 accounts worldwide. The majority of our artists love to sell their music on the worlds largest stores like iTunes and Amazon, which make up the majority of their revenues. Sometimes we have other services that just dont seem to generate the revenues expected.
Last.fm is a partner we added just after launch and they have been allowing our artists to promote their content to many millions of users worldwide, but the results in terms of revenues hasnt been what we expected. RouteNote has therefore made the very tough decision to stop our partnership with Last.fm. RouteNote artists just need to send us a take down email to: lastfm@routenote.com. Once received the RouteNote team will then remove your tracks from Last.fm.
Artists can now join to Last.fm themselves and promote their own music on the service. If you head to here for artists and here for labels, then you can receive your own royalties direct.
Only days after Spotify had a major upgrade which included a lot of social and sharing features, We7 has now announced some new sharing features of their own.
We7 is still yet to make an official announcement, but it seems that users can now connect to their Facebook account to post details while also scrobbling tracks to Last.fm.
Can music streaming ever be a viable alternative to hard copy and download music sales? WMG’s Edgar Bronfman has his doubts, and looking at some of the figures being published in the media they might seem reasonable. Increases in the number of users on services that provide on-demand music streaming (where you pick the track you want to hear like MOG, Spotify, and Grooveshark) correspond to decreases in music sales, while increases in use of radio’ streaming services [Last.fm, Pandora] seemed to drive more sales. There doesn’t seem to be any mystery as to why this might be; Spotify’s and MOG’s users no longer have any reason to buy music from other sources once they’re signed up (particularly as they can put their playlists on their iPods and other mobile devices if they buy a premium account), while Pandora and Last.fm’s customers have no guarantee of getting a particular track on their playlist again, so they have to buy it to hear it whenever they want. This might seem to be an open and shut case for the record labels; one service drives sales, while another cuts revenue – but it’s not quite as simple as that. Spotify has massive customer appeal, as the hordes that try and sign up every time they re-open user registration prove, and it also drives a lot of interaction with listeners; according to Spotify’s own figures the average use playlists around 15,000 tracks. The vast majority of Spotify’s users might be on the free-to-listen ad supported plan, with only single figure percentages signed up to their £10 a month premium package, but it’s clear that the proposition is incredibly attractive to consumers. The premium users represent a healthy annual income for the record labels to share with the platform; £120 a year is not an insignificant spend, and the potential for fledgling on demand platforms to increase their advertising revenue so that even the non-paying customers are generating profits for the record labels is proportional to the platforms’ desirability and popularity,
On demand services are what the consumer wants, and are proven to reduce the incidence of file sharing and online music piracy, something that unequivocally costs the music industry. Cutting off support for such services would surely drive a proportion of users back to illegal, non-revenue-generating, methods of consumption. Assessing the profitability of on demand against radio streaming will have to be done over the coming years as the platforms mature and adjust their business models, but it seems unlikely that killing off the most eagerly recieved of the net’s music biz babies just as they’re getting established would be a rational strategy for the industry.
For our part, we’re seeing tangible revenues come back for our artists from on demand services, and we’re happy to be able to help independent artists get music up on Spotify and in other online stores.
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.
An important trial regarding the illegal online distribution of music in the States has reached the next stage of the argument – there’s no longer much discussion about the fact that duplicating music over the net without rights holders permissions is illegal. Inevitable, perhaps, but certainly a clear violation of intellectual property law. What’s now being put into question is the appropriateness of the massive damages that are being sought by the record labels from individual file sharers.
In 2007, Jammie Thomas was sentenced to pay damages of $222,000 for 24 counts of infringement ($9,250 per infringement). Later, a retrial was granted, and in June 2009 a jury returned a similar decision, but with increased damages of $1.92 million ($80,000 per infringement). In July last year, Boston Student Joel Tenenbaum was also found to be willfully infringing, and a jury awarded damages of $675,000 ($22,500 per infringement). These vast sums were awarded by the American courts as ‘punitive’ damages – fines intended to deter others from repeating the criminal behaviour rather than as a straight like-for-like compensation for the actual, direct cost of the criminal action.
The amount of lost revenue from a stolen CD is pretty easy to calculate; the shop you take it from loses out on the sticker price, but if that CD is then made available to share over the net, who is responsible for the thousands of copies that may arise on people’s computers? Each individual that makes a copy can (at a stretch) be said to have stolen a product of the same value as the CD, but is the uploader responsible for the actions of the other offenders? Granted, if no-one uploaded the music, you’d be forced to go and buy it if you wanted to listen (assuming it’s not on Spotify or Last.FM of course), but the uploader of a track doesn’t actually make those thousands of copies; they just make it possible for them to be made. A slim distinction perhaps, but an important one; it could be (and is being) argued that ISP’s and torrent tracking/sharing websites are equally complicit in these piratical crimes. If this is the case, is it right to bring down the hammer of justice so hard on the single individuals that are caught and prosecuted? A lottery of punishment that victimises the few for the crimes of the many doesn’t seem a just way of combatting piracy…
Part of the motion that Tenenbaum’s lawyer’s have filed with the District Court of Massachussets, quotes a precedent from the US Supreme Court; “few awards exceeding a single-digit ratio between punitive and compensatory damages, to a significant degree, will satisfy due process.” Compensatory damages being the direct making-up-for-loss costs, and punitive damages the deterrent. To fall in line with that Supreme Court ruling, the direct damage Tenenbaum caused would have to be the equivalent of stealing $75,000 worth of music (at a 9x multiplier), and Jammie Thomas would have had to have left the record shop with $213,000 worth of CD’s in his backpack! Whatever the result of the retrial request, it seems somewhat academic in the specific case, as I can’t imagine a student can lay his hands on $675,000 to pay the damages.
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.
Thanks, and good luck!
