…if anyone’s a “new partner” in the music business these days, it’s the fans. They’re the ones promoting the music on social networks, uploading fan videos and homebrew remixes. They’re creating the atmosphere that makes live music more of a draw than ever before, they’re the ones buying – yes, buying – more singles than at any time in British music history. And they’re doing this at the same time as they’re downloading whole discographies via BitTorrent and sending leaked MP3s on Gmail. Underlying UK Music’s report is the assumption that the licensed activity and the unlicensed activity are separable, that you can punish the latter without hurting the former. But what if that’s not true – what if, as several studies of piracy and music purchasing seem to suggest, the good fans and the bad fans are the same people?

There are a few things on our tools page to help you reach out to fans, and more on ReverbNation, but if you’ve found something cool and useful, drop a link in the comments for everyone to use.

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1) A Les Paul guitar and a guitar lesson from Chris Funk of the Decemberists – the tools and the know-how, bidding currently at $267.55 – you’ll need to just quickly record an album, and then take up your second auction win…

2) A publicity and legal consultation package – currently selling for the ridiculously low bid of $81, and including “glamour shots”, a six week radio campaign with added plugging and industry gladhanding from Spectre entertainment in Portland, and consultation with media law specialists. Once you’ve got your music, publicity, image and legal team all under control it’ll be time for the next item to come into play.

3) Two tickets to SXSW music 2010 including plane travel – the most important music industry conference in the States, the walk-up rate for 2 music badges alone is $1,500, add the value of a plane ride to Austin TX, and the current auction price of $560 looks rather tempting. Get this in the bag, and you can take your new glamorous, legally sound, Les Paul toting act down to rub shoulders with the industry’s movers and shakers for a weekend, and see more bands at more venues than you normally would in a year into the bargain. Also there are more places to buy barbeque than is really healthy.

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Rock/Pop – Norfolk UK
Originally a college band formed by James Granger (Guitar) Lee Ashby (Bass & Bad Jokes) in 1996, The Monty, as they were then called, soon gained momentum performing their brand of Brit pop-rock material at countless venues around the UK. With influences such as The Who, Police and Pink Floyd to name a few, the mainstream classic rock sound that followed brought many fans of all ages. The band changed names on various occasions along with many drummers and keyboard players too. For a year they were known as The Hairy Palm Sundaes, injecting a sense of humour into the set whilst creating a reality rockumentary during one particular tour (yet to raise its head!).

The Band soon found a creative niche with Darren Link (Drums) and Matthew Richards (Mellodian), changed their name to The Swelltones (partly derived from their coastal origins) and developed their characteristic full-on sound, crossing the genre borders with a rock-reggae-punk-funk fusion. They subsequently took to the studio with producer Ross Griggs a.k.a – Billy Unbelievable (Boned) to create the EP Big Fat Fish.

With a busy live schedule and an album in the pipeline for 2010 [EDIT: We look forward to hearing that in moderation ], you’d better watch out for these guys as they continue to put the fun into funk and rock on and on and on!

Goldfish Bowl

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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.

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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.

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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.

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