Archive for: music store
I would like to introduce RouteNote Direct! RouteNote Direct is a direct to fan service for RouteNote Artists. Artists are able to sell their music direct to their fans on their own unqiue store, which has the ability to customize price and even look and feel. Here are the key features of RouteNote Direct.
# Artists receive 85% of all the earnings from RouteNote Direct sales.
# Earnings go instantly into artists Paypal account
# Real time play stats
# SEO for site and simple URLs
# Ability to customize your own store
# Control your own release and track pricing
# OHHH did I mention its FREE
How to Add your releases to RouteNote Direct:
1. Upload your new release and select RouteNote Direct as a store partner
2. Go to > My Content > select release and edit … then add RouteNote Direct as a store partner
There is a RouteNote Direct tab at the top of all artist accounts. You send your releases live and then you can completely control the store from this location.
Make sure you promote your pages on Facebook, Twitter and to your fan base.
p.s. RouteNote Direct is currently in beta testing, so if you have any suggestion please feel free to drop us an email. Lots of cool features coming very soon!
Example of a RouteNote Direct Store: Among Lights: Influenced By
Users can also sign up to just use RouteNote Direct… you dont need to distribute your music to all of our partners.
Amie Street has been acquired and merged into Amazon. Amie Street allowed customers to purchase digital downloads at a price that was dependent upon the popularity of the track. Over time a lot of artists tried out the service, songs were downloaded over 10 million times. The Amie Street team will be focused on Songza, which they acquired back in 2009.
According to Techcrunch:
Amazon will redirect Amie Street to a new cobranded Amie Street/Amazon Music Service site and give users a $5 coupon to purchase songs on Amazon. But while the users and the brand are being acquired, Amazon will most likely ditch the business model, say the founders (stressing that they don’t know for sure).
More innovation bites the dust!
MusicAlly has reported that the People’s Music Store is heading for closure. The People’s Music Store is a UK startup that lets music fans set up and run their own digital music store. They signed with Universal Music, but that wasnt even enough to save the business.
Co-founder Ged Day has written to users explaining that the store will go offline this Friday. “Unfortunately, [co-founder] Ed and I have made the difficult decision to take our company in a different direction and so have decided to take peoplesmusicstore.com offline,” he writes.
“This is something that has loomed over us for a while now, and I am happy to say that we really did hold on for as long as we could given the circumstances, but it has now reached the point where we must consider alternative routes.”
The idea of turning music fans into actual curators is very interesting and Im sure that this basic idea will lead to a few more startups of this nature in the near future. 
Guy Hands and his team at the high flying venture capital firm Terra Firma have been chewing sour grapes ever since their purchase of recording giant EMI for £2.4 billion. They have been in court with their lenders Citibank over bad advice during the sale of the label, and have been practically walking on water to meet the huge cash demand of the interest payments on their gigantic loan (although they stopped short of selling off the Abbey Rd. Studios to get a cash fix). Now they are again scrabbling around to find £120 million to plug a covenant breach on the same loan, and a deal is in the offing from WMG to buy the still-profitable music publishing arm of EMI, an asset it’s been coveting over the garden fence for decades. Any bid for the £1.2 billion publishing arm is probably going to be made after EMI have cleared or defaulted on their next interest payment, in the first case, making an offer to EMI and Terra Firma, and in the second, talking to their creditor Citi if the company goes into receivership.
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.
Warner Music Group has had mixed experiences with investing in music startups; losing out heavily on their purchase of Imeem and Lala, and their bad experiences look like preventing them from investing in any other online startups. Their spokesman Stephen Bryan, during a panel at Midem, pointed out the difficulty of trying to run a company subsidiary with opposite interests to its owner. Imeem and Lala were attracting customers with as much music as possible for as little investment (whether that be in terms of ad views or dollars paid), while WMG was concerned to make as much money for each stream or download of every song in their catalogue. A reluctance to find themselves in this ‘stuck in the middle’ position again and the money they burnt means that they profess reluctance to own any more services.
Bryan did state that they’re very happy with their relationship with Spotify, which is going from strength to strength in terms of both users and advertising revenue. The less likely WMG is to invest in new services, the better Spotify will be pleased, as Warner will be more likely to channel all their efforts into promoting their content with their part owned partner.
The Orchard’s majority stock owners, Dimensional Associates, are considering a bid from music streaming service eMusic’s owners, JDS Capital. JDS have been angling for a majority in The Orchard for a while, and this is the third time they’ve come to the table with a new bid, this time of $2, up from their original price of $1.68.
The period between the announcement of the initial bid and this last news has seen the Orchard’s stock prices climb out of the trough they were in last October (a $1.05 low point). The advantages to the tie in of a music distributor and a music streaming service are obvious, as eMusic would gain unlimited access to The Orchard’s catalogue, and take advantage of the entire chain of profit between musician and consumer, using their own services to promote artists they think will sell.
Emusic has just announced that they’ve licensed not only Warner Music’s catalogue, but that of every one of their associated sub-labels. From their blog:
So — quite a few new arrivals today, eh US members?
Over 10,000 albums, to be precise, a dizzying avalanche of stuff from the Warner Music Group. No matter your taste in music, there’s sure to be something here that appeals to you.
The increased catalogue will hopefully mean more subscribers, which in turn will mean more pairs of ears that can access all the music that RouteNote distributes to them… A small trickle down perhaps, but positive news none the less.
A lot of poorly substantiated figures are being thrown around regarding what online music piracy costs the industry. Illegal digital downloads of copyrighted material like music, movies and games has been one of the hottest political topics of the last year, with everyone from Peter Mandelson to Lily Allen weighing in on the subject, but no-one can come up with a definitive figure on how much of the market value the music industry has lost over the last ten years is attributable to pirates stealing music rather than buying it from music download stores like iTunes and Emusic. The BPI’s contention that “Jupiter estimate that losses to online music piracy amounted to £180m in 2008, and predict they will rise to £200m in 2009″ is seemingly based on the idea that one illegal download equals one lost sale, but that’s not really true; bacause someone is prepared to pinch something to listen to it, doesn’t mean they are necessarily prepared to pay full price for a copy. This is certainly the opinion of BT consumer boss John Petton, who called the BPI’s claims “melodramatic”, and estimated that the cost of enforcing the measures that the UK government proposes to deal with online piracy will cost around £365m ($583.4m) a year [!].
Scoffing ensued from rights agencies after this announcement from BT, but now government ministers have revealed that the costs will be more like £500 million annually. According to the Times – “Impact assessments published alongside the Bill predict that the measures will generate £1.7 billion in extra sales for the film and music industries over the next ten years, as well as £350 million for the Government in extra VAT.” These figures are presumably based on the assumption that everything that is stolen would otherwise be bought, which is pretty optimistic… What is certain if the current bill is enacted, is that the majority of law-abiding consumers will end up paying a vast amount to police the actions of the few – if the wild estimates we report are true, more money than is lost by the music industry to pirates annually by a factor of two. Hardly an equitable proposition.
What should be remembered is that this explosion of piracy has been driven by consumer demand, and the convenience offered by online piracy. Rather than focusing on punishing the minority responsible for the piracy, it would seem more appropriate for the music industry and rights bodies to direct their efforts towards making the convenience and level of ‘service’ provided by file sharing legally and financially viable. If we are being expected to pay £25 extra a year each for our net connection, more than double what the music industry says it’s losing to pirates, then surely it would be better to provide extra services to the average consumer for that money, than to spend it on persecuting people who probably wouldn’t be pirating in the first place if what they were after was more readily available online.
Myspace’s efforts to update their site’s music functionality by integrating technology purchased with their buyout of Imeem are plodding slowly ahead. There’s been no evidence of an update on site, but this email went out to Imeem users:
The MySpace Music team is working around the clock to duplicate your imeem playlists and make them available to you on myspacemusic.com as soon as possible. In the coming weeks, we will be emailing you with instructions on how to claim your playlists on MySpace Music, using your MySpace login. If you don’t have a MySpace account you can sign up for one here.
If you have questions about MySpace, please visit http://faq.myspace.com/app/home.
Thanks for your patience. We will be in touch soon.
- MySpace Music Team
How a net business with hundreds of millions of dollars of annual revenue can allow so much time to slip by in a market where they’re losing ground every day is hard to fathom – small as Imeem’s fire-sale purchase price may have been compared to Myspace’s turnover, their tech contribution was substantial, and constitutes a big opportunity for Myspace to catch back up to it’s competitors. One can only assume that Imeem were playing harball and not releasing anything before the lawyers had all shaken hands and inked the contracts, and are not particularly motivated by the Murdoch lash. I can see that having your company fail under you and being bought out by Darth Rupert might be disheartening.
