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.
If you haven’t already noticed we have 2 partners who have been added to the sidebar of our blog. Those partners offer RouteNote artists with some great savings and also a great promotional opportunity.
eMusic – eMusic has been a lot term partner of RouteNote since launch and we thought we would help them out and promote their service to our readers and artists. If you use the banner in our sidebar to signup to eMusic you will receive 35 free downloads with your free trail.
Cafepress – Cafepress is a very new partner with RouteNote. Cafepress offers artists with the ability to quickly signup and create their own store packed full of t-shirts and other merchandise. If you use the Cafepress banner you get access to Cafepress premium for free, plus you have the ability to customise your store so its tailored to fit your band. There are no setup fees and you simply make money when you sell your merchandise.
RouteNote will have a lot more partners joining very soon. Additionally, we will soon be launching an upgraded version of our tools page which will offer exclusive offers to RouteNote artists. Partnerships in a variety of areas will be added, such as marketing tools, advertising tools, merchandise, applications, widgets and more.
After launching a new app to the world to benefit from more music on your phone Spotify and found themselves with increasing demand, forcing them to revert back to invite only. The application, which is available in the iPhone and Google Anroid headsets was released only a few days ago, is almost certainly responsible for the explosion in visitors and subscribers which has forced the company to start limiting the amount of visits to the site.
Premium users however can still use the service as normal and you can invite a friend to join. On the companies blog, Spotify’s spokesman Andres Sehr wrote:
“The huge demand in the UK over the last few days since we launched our mobile service means we are going to have to temporarily reinstate our invite system, Premium users will of course still get instant access as per usual and all current users will be able to use Spotify as normal”.
Spotify, who has approximately 8 million users worldwide, 2 million of which are in the UK alone. The company plans to launch in China and the US in the next few months. Users can access millions of tracks for free in exchange for listening to the occasional radio style advert, or pay £9.99 per month for ad-free listening. The new Spotify phone app is included in the price.
Disclosure: RouteNote is currently a Spotify partner
Here are RouteNote we have been very open about our statistics and offering from the beginning. Today I just wanted to run through how RouteNote is progressing and what you can expect for the future moving forward.
RouteNote Growth:
As most startups in the current economic climate RouteNote is no different, we have a very limited advertising and marketing budget which of course means growth doesnt have the possibilities as it would otherwise. However, we have been seeing an increase in traffic every month which is quite positive. I think this increase in traffic has a lot to do with the great press we have been receiving from all over the web (Rev2, Techcrunch UK, CNet, and more).
Additionally, we have been keeping track of how long it has taken RouteNote to reach goals of 1000 track intervals. It took RouteNote 199 days to reach 1000 tracks online, but the next 1000 tracks only took 109 days, and this last 1000 tracks which now brings us to over 3000 tracks online took 76 days to reach. The site is rising and our service is increase and becoming more efficient everyday.
Partners:
RouteNote has been developing new partnerships will all different types of companies in a variety of areas. Here at RouteNote we believe that diversity in digital music distribution is key. With download stores there are really only three main players at the moment, iTunes, eMusic and Amazon, and RouteNote has partnership argeements with all of these stores. Soon we will be adding more partnerships to help our musician push their music across the entire internet with the aim of allowing them to reach the mass market, while at the same time offering them top royalty and revenue schemes that are the best in the industry. Watch out for RouteNote partnering with some of the biggest growing music services on the web.
New Features Coming Soon:
Here at RouteNote we launched in the same way as many other startups. First you have private beta, then beta, then launch the site with a full service. Here at RouteNote we followed the same kind of structure but for us the beta tag is only there because we were yet to release our desktop upload tool. This tool and the beta tag should be completed in the coming months. Additionally, we are looking to add more services in our tools section which aims to help artists find great deals and provide them with the right tools to help self-promotion.
Overall:
RouteNote is still growing at a steady pace and we are aiming over this time to increase our offering as much as possible. As a RouteNote user you will see added partners in terms of stores, mobile, streaming, licensing and others, as well as a much more rounded product offering.
