So who is at fault here? Blocking the public from buying tickets wholesale with highly organised, bulk buying and reselling operations seems pretty underhand and unsporting, but the scalpers are taking the risk that people will purchase the inflated tickets, so isn’t it just the normal exercise of a free market? Are the promoters missing a trick in the first place? A staggered ebay auction style release of tickets by the promoter, with say 25% of total tickets released 12, 8, 4 and 2 weeks before the gig, with prices starting at a reasonable face value would surely have the same free-market effect. There’s the strong argument that this competetive model would be a disservice to the less affluent fans, but promoters would have the same chance of selling out a venue at the starting price, and could only benefit from any uplift if the tickets ended up being worth more to a punter than the original price – if they were bid up by competing punters, and this would make it harder for scalpers to get hold of tickets in the first place, as to get them they’d have to compete with Joe Public in the first place, paying the elevated prices themselves. It would also go some way to eliminating their profits – why buy from an unofficial auction when there’s an official one happening, and could potentially make more money for the promoter, venue and artist if the ticket revenue is split out between them.

What do you think, internet people? Is sclaping fair practice, or callous parasitism? Would selling online like this just be a way for promoters to benefit at fans’ expense, or would it be a neat way of cutting scalpers out of the loop and rationalising ticket prices for the rest of us?

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We don’t charge any upfront or subscription fees, and only charge a 10% fee out of any revenue that you get once you start selling music. Other sites either expect you to shell out fees that can end up totalling hundreds of dollars before you even sell a single track, or take big chunks out of your back end in return for their services (The Orchard will take a flat rate of 30%). Other places will charge you depending on how many stores you want to sell through (Tunecore, Musicadium) – we don’t do any of this stuff. We just want you to confirm that you can license us the rights to distribute the music you upload, tell us the email address attached to the paypal account you want us to send revenues to and then upload your music. Our contract doesn’t make any claims on the music’s copyright, just enables us to make, store and  send copies of your files, and it has a break clause of 60 days, so if you get fed up with us, or suddenly get signed by Warner you’ve only got a couple of months maximum wait before you can make a move. Once you pass our moderation (we need to check you’ve not just uploaded a Spice Girls album, or some hateful tirade against Guinea Pig owners) we’ll turn it around within 4 weeks and get your music to iTunes, eMusic, Spotify, Amazon MP3, Snocap, and other online digital stores that cover more than 95% of the online market.

You can check out our agreement once you’ve input your details in the Register page – don’t worry, you don’t need to sign your life away to look at the agreement – you have to specifically agree before we’re in business! We hope you’ll think it’s equitable (feedback on what you’d change is always welcome), and we look forward to having you join the 1,500 artists and labels who are already working with us to make their music make money.

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Location: Portsmouth UK

Bio: Hailing from the south coast of England in a blur of whiskey soaked rock n roll meet Jenna’s Revenge!

The four piece, consisting of the charismatic “Sic” McLaren’s often astounding vocals, Craig Farley’s neck-breakingly catchy guitar riffs and blistering solos, the ever groove laden bass rumblings of “Super Nice Brad Ice”, and the hard hitting punch of Greg Daley’s drums, play an energetic blend of unashamed, “old school”, feel good rock music.

The band always give a frenetic live show that has seen them play alongside the likes of New Wave of British Heavy Metal legends “Tygers of Pan Tang”, controversial pop-punks “Towers of London”, friends of Iron Maiden “Voodoo Six”, the Myspace phenomena “Koopa”, and American guitar hero Adam Bomb.

Jenna’s Revenge aim to entertain and delight you and with song subjects ranging the full ambit from strippers to warfare all covered with tongue firmly in cheek we’re sure you’ll find something to tap your toes to!

Inspired by a wide range of influences from Extreme, Queen, Motley Crue and Skid Row to Rod Stewart, the Quireboys and the red hot chilli peppers, along with a list of other bands that could go on for several pages, Jenna’s Revenge set out to make music that we enjoy since there seemed to be a serious lack of bands around that were doing that for us!  Hopefully you’ll like what we do too as that’s pretty key to our plan for world domination succeeding…

Our website: www.jennasrevenge.co.uk or www.myspace.com/jennasrevenge

Years by user309147

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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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• Digital Music Store Focus – HMV.com – October 9, 2009

***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).

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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.

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• Digital Music Store Focus – HMV.com – October 9, 2009

Related Articles

• Digital Music Store Focus – Napster 2.0 < – October 15, 2009
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• Digital Music Store Focus – HMV.com – October 9, 2009

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).

Related Articles

• Digital Music Store Focus – Napster 2.0 < – October 15, 2009
• Digital Music Store Focus – iTunes – October 14, 2009
• Digital Music Store Focus – Insound – October 12, 2009
• Digital Music Store Focus – iMesh – October 12, 2009
• The Self-Indulgent Friday Playlist – Girls, Boys, Alcohol and Dancing – October 9, 2009