Archive for: music marketing

Distribution and Marketing for Music Videos

After we published the post on the comparison between our digital music distribution service and those of our competitors, we got some comments talking about tools that you can use to promote your music online. A good one to get started with is TubeMogul. If you’ve produced a video for your latest track (like this one for The People’s String Foundation’s new album) then you can use TubeMogul to get it up with multiple video sites, YouTube, Break, Viddler, Dailymotion, Revver etc. You can also track the stats for each video across all the different sites, and promote your video through their targeted content network.

Blackroc – Album Release Analysed

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.

Posting MP3′s for Free Helps Drive Sales

Australian blogger Andrew McMillen recently hosted a panel on the digital music industry in Perth, on which sat Simon Wheeler – director of digital at Beggar’s Group, an amalgamation of some big indie labels here in the UK [they're on the same road as my old primary school ]. Mr. Wheeler has some pretty progressive and pragmatic attitudes to online promotion, and some forward thinking methods that it might be useful for artists to replicate in their own spheres.

“…we know that fans are passionate about an artist, and they’re very excited about a new album. So to be able to give them something to satiate that demand somewhat has been quite effective. There’s also the purpose of giving people a piece of music to ‘try before they buy’, if you like. We get a lot of love and a lot of coverage in the blog world, because I think our artists are very suited to that world.

We don’t give music blogs free reign, because you’d find that each blog would post a different track from the album, and so ten minutes after you’d publicised the album, people could just go and download the whole album (laughs).

So by making available one chosen, one focus track from a new album – much as you take a track to radio – there’s kind of an unwritten dialogue between us and the bloggers. We don’t tell them to post it, we don’t say they can’t post it; if people post the whole album, we’ll definitely say they can’t do that, and we’ll get it taken down. But they understand that if we post an mp3 to one of our label sites or blogs, then they won’t get any grief from us at all [if they repost it to their blog].

This really helps focus the campaign around a lead track, much as you do when taking a track to radio. There’s no new science here; this is just what the record industry has been doing for decades. We’re just applying that to the digital age.”

Making a few tracks available for streaming or download online is a great hook for pulling people into an album or gig ticket purchase – that’s one of the major reasons myspace was such a success, bands need to connect with fans these days. Blink 182′s Tom Delonge is of the same opinion: [via Hypebot, via Techdirt, via The Guitar Center]

Digital Music Store Focus – Recordstore.co.uk

London based company Digital Stores Limited has been building online shops for various high profile clients for the best part of a decade (they were incorporated in ’97), and have put up their own record shop, selling both digital and physical releases. Their catalogue seems to include material from all of the majors – indeed, I had to think quite hard before I caught their search function out (they don’t have any Zetan Spore, a trance band from down here in Cornwall). Album prices range between £4.95 (indie mp3 album download) to £12.49 (mainstream CD order).

A nice addition to their retail arsenal is a signed exclusive section, where they list special artist-signed editions of new releases (as I write Biffy Clyro, Athlete, Idlewild and Maps are among the artists listed in this section). Prices don’t seem inflated from regular retail cost, so this seems like a great way of picking up something a bit more special for a fan who’ll appreciate having an artifact rather than just a download. Other than this little bonus, I can’t see much to distinguish Recordstore.co.uk from the competition – prices are reasonably similar, the range is pretty comprehensive, but you could get the same service from Amazon. On the other hand, I support them on the same principle that makes me buy food from the farmers market rather than ASDA, the smaller retailers care more, and I think small businesses are a good thing for keeping a marketplace varied, vibrant and full of innovation. Much as we are a smaller enterprise but provide an alternative digital music distribution solution to the bigger players like the Orchard.

Digital Music Store Focus – Napster 2.0 <

Napster originated as a peer-to-peer music service in 1999, one of the first that gained widespread popularity. Unlike modern bit-torrent services it provided a connection between users through a central server, and this direct involvement in the file-sharing process rendered it vulnerable to a slew of lawsuits brought by (to name but a few) Metallica, Dr. Dre, Madonna, A&M records and Bertelsmann Gruppe.

These lawsuits culminated in Napster’s bankruptcy, and its purchase at the bankruptcy auction by Roxio (of CD burning fame) – who have converted it into a subscription streaming service. Users can pay GBP£5 a month for unlimited streams from Napster’s 8 million strong catalogue, plus 5 tracks to download and keep as MP3s. There’s also the option to buy download tracks on an a-la-carte basis once you’re subscribed. In addition to this, Napster also provides a free streaming site, with limited functionality, and access to three quarters of its catalogue. Users can’t make playlists from this site, and it’s a lot slower and harder to use than the subscription platform.

The subscription service is cheaper than Spotify Premium or eMusic, its closest competitors in terms of service, and the fact that all of Napster’s members are subscribers makes it’s income much more reliable than the advertising based model that still makes up the bulk of Spotify’s trading, (the Economist reported that only 40,000 of the 6 million users who had downloaded the free platform have subscribed to the premium service) and thus better able to provide a steady income to it’s contributing artists, were it not for the odd addition of it’s free streaming service to the mix. Napster’s operations seem a little confused, different elements pulling in different directions from one another; a steady income from the subscription service, with a clunky ad supported option detracting from it; a limited MP3 download service clashing with both and yet failing to make it easy for users to take music away from their PC’s. If they could centralise all of these elements into a neat platform and make it easy to use, they’d have a model that looked a bit like Spotify’s, but it’s yet to be seen whether that can be turned into a profitable business in the long term.

Digital Music Store Focus – iTunes

No prizes for recognizing that logo, this is the biggest music store on the web. The store isn’t available using a normal web browser, only by installing Apple’s proprietory iTunes software, relentlessly updated to include more efficient ways of getting you to buy more content of different types, for every single one of your lovely Apple products.

Combined with the iPod, Apple’s online music store must be one of the biggest success stories on the net. They were surprisingly late on the scene; MP3’s were invented way back in 1991, eMusic’s first incarnation was born in 1998 , and the iTunes store didn’t go live until April 2003 (a year and a half after the iPod launched). Five years later, in April of ’08, iTunes overtook Wal-Mart to become the biggest music retailer in the USA, and was reported by Reuters as selling over 70% of all digital music worldwide. The IFPI calculated the global digital market as worth USD$3783.8 billion in 2008 – conflating these figures means the iTunes store turned over $2648.66 billion on music alone: by their own report, they sold 2 billion songs worldwide between January 15^th 2008 and January 6^th 2009 – OK, so the IFPI comparison gives them more than a dollar a track per sale, which isn’t the case, but the figures aren’t entirely disparate.

Here’s a breakdown (drawn from Apples published stats) of how music sales have accelerated for Apple over the last 6 and a bit years:

To save you the horror of another of my poorly structured Excel ’03 graphs – here’s one lifted from the very informative Wikipedia page that unfortunately only covers the trend up to 6billion tracks. (If anyone can recommend a better program for graphing, please tell me in the comments!)

The success of their online proposition has been underpinned by the massive success of the iPod – over 218 million units have now been sold, meaning that the average iPod owner would only need to have bought 40 tracks from the iTunes store to account for all sales. That’s less than 4 albums worth each, and I think I probably have a few hundred albums in my collection.

iPod Sales by Quarter

Unless you’re a pretty hardcore nerd, you’ll be forced to manage your iPod through iTunes, and that shop is just so conveniently placed within the same piece of software that it’s easy to see how those track sales figures come about. Even accounting for a decent percentage of hardware failures, obsolescences and droppings into a pint of beer for those iPods out there (yes, I have had all of these happen), the iTunes captive audience (don’t forget all those iMac and Macbook users) is still 150 million strong and buying hard.

Track prices are relatively high, with occasional offers and a regular set of free sample downloads from artists promoting themselves. Apple users don’t seem to mind this, and it translates into pretty good profitability for artists selling through iTunes, 65% of the revenue from each sale is piped on down to the provider of the tracks sold, and there’s no variability in per track income as with the ad-supported streaming services. RouteNote can get your music on itunes without you having to pay anything up front.

Digital Music Store Focus – Insound

Insound is a minor player with a lot of heart involved in its operation. They essentially act as a blog and record label, picking up and supporting new acts that are to their taste, promoting them and selling their music through the site. They’re a smaller retailer that survives by taking an active interest in the bands they sell, keeping their margins high (read higher prices to the consumer – MP3 downloads $9.99-$10.49) and selling other trendy stuff, badges, bags, books etc. If you can convince them that you’re worth selling they’ll really make an effort to put you out in front of their indie audience, with promotional tools like free MP3 downloads and custom merch to drag people in to buy your music. RouteNote doesn’t currently do digital distribution to Insound – your best bet would be to approach them directly.

***EDIT***

Just to respond to that comment: a totally unfair comparison of someone who happened to be on Insound’s MP3 download front page when I looked, The Castanets, shows their album ‘Texas Rose…’ as being $1.50 cheaper on Amazon ($8.99) than on Insound ($10.49). Please feel free to refute me with your own research. I think Insound might deserve the extra money for taking an active interest in the bands they promote, and I hope they pass on more $ to their artists, but as a straight comparison, Amazon is cheaper (admittedly this is only one example).

Digital Music Store Focus – iMesh

iMesh is a peer-to-peer platform that has survived the legal harrow of the recording industry. The RIAA brought a copyright infringement case against them, which they settled out of court, and after which they changed their business model to be based on subscriptions within North America. Those of us lucky enough to live in Europe can still use the file sharing service without paying a $29.99 annual fee, and even the hapless Americans can use the iMesh ‘to go’ service, paying for tracks individually.

The music they offer up through their search is based on results from youtube, which streams quite smoothly in a little window on their GUI (the program window), and on the hard drives of the various iMesh users logged on at a given time (you all know how peer to peer works, right?). They have agreements with the RIAA (and thus the labels and artists listed with them) to pay royalties on streams and downloads, but they also have a vast amount of content that has not had copyright claimed. This doesn’t mean that copyright doesn’t exist in those tracks, just that the people the tracks belong to haven’t objected to their being used on iMesh’s service, which doesn’t seem particularly equitable if they don’t know its happening. RouteNote doesn’t currently do digital distribution to iMesh, but if you’re a user, you can put your own tracks in your iMesh folder to be shared. You won’t recieve any revenue thereby unless you’re registered with one of their partner mechanical copyright agencies like the RIAA or MCPS though.

The Self-Indulgent Friday Playlist – Girls, Boys, Alcohol and Dancing

This is inexcusable, I know. But here is a poorly conceived, badly executed playlist for all of my Spotify loving comrades. However, in preparation for your weekend I have prepared you slightly more than an hour’s worth of music on the theme described in the title. It starts off slow, plumbs the depths of cheese, and pretty much stays there. May your Saturday nights be forever fevered.

Digital Music Store Focus – HMV.com

HMV’s online store is an extension of their high street business, and as such caters mainly to the mainstream. The prices are high but the catalogue is pretty varied; they’ve got deals with all the majors, and they do carry a lot of offers that cheapen their products, two-for-one deals etc. Another plus is that they provide a one stop shop for digital, physical and merchandise products in a more coherent, music oriented way than Amazon do (unless you visit their subsidiary, Play.com). There’s no subscription option or anything, it’s just a nice simple version of their bricks and mortar operation without you having to traipse those weary miles to the town centre, or possibly wheel down there on your special fat guy scooter. RouteNote doesn’t currently distribute to HMV, but we can get you onto Amazon, who’ll make physical CD’s for you (soon).