Archive for: sales
At RouteNote we are constantly thinking up new ways to improve the site for our clients and partners. The latest launch has been a makeover of the user statistics presentation that enables both artist and label to view their sales and downloads with ease. Clear, dynamic, graphs and drop down selectors make it easy to isolate the statistics of a track, an album or even an entire artist’s catalogue.
Some key features:
- Label level information – record labels are now presented with total earnings over all artists in a summary and monthly breakdown.
- Top ten tracks – record labels and artists are now provided with a top ten of their uploaded tracks.
- Artist breakdown – in addition to our previous album/track breakdown we have updated an artist breakdown, which should allow record labels to keep track of their artists individually.
- Territory download percentage – this percentage pie charts shows the user in which territories their label/artists/albums/tracks are selling. This will be useful for targeting your market and optimising your promotion strategy.
- Retail store downloads - this percentage pie chart compares the ratio between sales in each digital store.
Please take the time to asses the new changes and all feedback, good or bad (not too bad or you’ll make us cry), is welcome!
Thanks to all clients for your constant support, happy selling!
Regards,
The RouteNote Team
Sales statistics for June 2009 have now been finalised, so be sure to check in on how your music is doing!
A big thank you to all account holders for your continued support and patience whilst we continue to close deals and develop the website.
Signed,
The RouteNote Team
It has been reported that US sales of recorded music will drop to $5.52 billion in 2013. This downward trajectory will extend a pattern that began in 2000, when physical sales started to decline after rising dramatically during the heyday of the CD.
The U.K. recorded music business held up reasonably well in 2008 with trade value down by 5.3% to £894 million ($1.368 billion) and retail value down by 6% to £1.308 billion ($2.002 billion), according to new figures from trade body the BPI. That compares to falls of 13% and 15% for, respectively, trade and retail value between 2006 and 2007.
In 2008 album sales were still on the decline by 3.2% by volume while at the same time digital album sales was up 65% from 2007. Digital albums by Coldplay, Duffy and Kings of Leon each moved more than 100,000 units last year.
The figures also show that 109.8 million single tracks were downloaded in 2008, a 41.6% year-on-year increase. Digital tracks now account for 95.3% of the singles market.
“The rapid growth of the digital market is clear evidence that British record companies have the business models in place to deliver music to fans online,” said BPI chief executive Geoff Taylor in a statement.
“The impressive fact that one pound in every ten is earned online shows that labels are leading the way in the entertainment world in developing digital services.”
He added: “BPI’s research also shows that U.K. record companies invest 21% of turnover on sales in A&R expenditure – identifying and developing new musical talent – over the last three years.”
Rock was still the dominant genre in the albums market, representing 35.7% of sales, while pop increased its share from 22.3% to 25.3%.
In the retail sector, specialists still dominate the albums market, with HMV the market leader with a 24.1% share by expenditure. Tesco is the biggest mass merchant with a 10.5% share, while iTunes has 5.7% total market share in the U.K. and dominates the digital album market. The Internet home delivery services, including Amazon and Play.com, account for 17.6% of the market.
For singles, iTunes’ share of expenditure is up to 65.7% of the market, while unit share is 71.8%.
Research also shows that 7.2 million MP3 players were sold in 2008, with a third of the U.K. population now owning one. Almost a third (28%) of 16 to 24 year olds listen to music at least weekly on a mobile phone, with one in 10 using services such as Spotify and Last.fm at least once a week.
Source: Billboard
Sales statistics for April 2009 have now been finalised, so be sure to check in on how your music is doing!
A big thank you to all account holders for your continued support and patience whilst we continue to close deals and develop the website.
Signed,
The RouteNote Team
Sales statistics for February 2009 have now been finalised, so be sure to check in on how your music is doing!
A big thank you to all account holders for your continued support and patience whilst we continue to close deals and develop the website.
Signed,
The RouteNote Team
We’re aware of the fact that we’re a small company compared to some of our competitors, but our cost to bands is also smaller than most of them. All of our major competitors make a charge for either uploading or hosting your tracks, subscription fees, renewal fees, charges for ISRC codes, different charges based on how many outlets you want your music to appear in, the ways they find of hiding new charges are as innovative as they are various.
We don’t charge you anything until you start making money. Uploading is free, hosting is free, picking different stores is free, in fact everything is free until you sell your first track, at which point we’ll take 10% of the revenue that comes back. You get to keep 90% of everything we make by working together. Ours isn’t the lowest percentage rate in the market: CDbaby offer 91% to their clients, but their upfront charges mean that not only do you have to get your credit card out of your wallet and pay them before you can hope to see any return from selling your music, but you’re also worse off with them than us until you sell more than ten thousand units. The same is true of Tunecore and Musicadium, and the Orchard never get close, as they take 30% of sales revenue for themselves AND charge you $90 up front.
Here’s a little table showing what you’d pay up front to distribute 2 albums over two years through some of the big distro sites (Musicadium deal in AUD, which I’ve converted at today’s rate of 1.549 to the USD).
And here’s another detailing the income you’d get from various levels of sales, again based on distributing 2 albums over 2 years to all the stores RouteNote deals with, with an average per track income of $0.65, which is what you get back from iTunes.
As you get up to the 5k mark, Tunecore begin to pull ahead, it’s all pretty even around 10,000 and there are undeniable differences in the revenue earned when you get up towards to 30k sales mark, but we’re cheaper all the way up there, and the money will only ever flow one way – to you – if you deal with us.
So why are we better than our competitors? For artists starting out on their own, who want to be in control of their own destinies until they can prove the worth of their music, who don’t want to spend up-front money, and who aren’t realistically looking for sales of thirty thousand records in the first year or two, we are cheaper, quicker and much more interested in the success of our artists, because we’re smaller and our own success is that much more closely linked to that of our musical partners (read some of our testimonials!).
We had a response from Musicadium about this post – querying the way we’d worked out the fees mentioned. Here’s how it works out, based on the figures here in their agreement:
2 x upload fee to more than 3 stores = 2 x $99 = $198
2 x barcode (UPC) generation = 2 x $39 = $78
2 x annual renewal fee = 2 x $20 = $40
198 + 78 + 40 = 316
$316AUD / 1.549 = $204.00USD
Although the exchange rate has probably changed by now…
A lot of people get in touch with us to ask how many digital stores we distribute music to, and what proportion of the digital music market they represent. We also hear comments on the relatively small number of people we deal with in comparison to the huge lists of partners at some of our competitors, e.g. CDbaby, Emubands, IODA…(without mentioning the duplication in the last two).
The simple truth is that while a long list of digital music stores might look good, beyond the top 3 or 4 retailers it makes very little difference to overall sales how many your music’s in. It’s fairly common knowledge that iTunes is the biggest player in the market, but the scale of their dominance is pretty staggering. Neilsen (the ratings and market reporting firm) reports total US music sales of 1,513 million units in 2008, with 1070 million of those sales being digital downloads. That’s a billion digital music downloads across the entire US.
In 2008, across all territories, iTunes sold more than Two Billion tracks.
| Apple iTunes Store Music Sales |
| Date |
Tracks Sold (Millions) |
| 01/08/2004 |
100 |
| 16/12/2004 |
200 |
| 02/03/2005 |
300 |
| 10/05/2005 |
400 |
| 18/07/2005 |
500 |
| 10/01/2006 |
850 |
| 23/02/2006 |
1,000 |
| 12/09/2006 |
1,500 |
| 10/01/2007 |
2,000 |
| 09/04/2007 |
2,500 |
| 31/07/2007 |
3,000 |
| 15/01/2008 |
4,000 |
| 19/06/2008 |
5,000 |
| 06/01/2009 |
6,000 |
Excuse the horrid old excel graph, I’m still running Office ’03…
It’s difficult to get a believable estimate for the size of the global digital music market, but given that the USA is the biggest single economy by a long way (the whole of the EU only just beats it in the CIA factbook at $14.98 trillion to $14.58 trillion), you begin to get a picture of how much of a monopoly iTunes has. Their competitors are of a different order: Amazon weighed in at 27 million digital tracks sold in the first six months of 2008, and the CEO of eMusic (David Pakman) estimated that Amazon have got about 4%-5% of the US music market, which going from Neilsen’s estimates puts them at about 48,150,000 tracks annually. Pakman also claims an approx. 10%-15% market share for eMusic, with 7 million downloads sold monthly (7*12 = 84).
By browsing eMusic’s sales milestone press releases, you can plot a rough course for their sales:
| eMusic Digital Music Sales |
| Date |
Tracks Sold (Millions) |
| 01/09/2004 |
0 |
| 01/12/2004 |
3 |
| 01/12/2006 |
100 |
| 25/09/2007 |
160 |
| 14/04/2008 |
200 |
| 20/11/2008 |
250 |
I’ll spare you another ugly graph. eMusic has sold 250 million tracks since it’s relaunch in 2004, and Amazon’s only been going for about a year now, 300 million tracks let’s say, which pales beside iTunes’ 6 billion total sales.
One can argue with the estimates, but the main thrust of my argument is hopefully becoming clear. A conservative 15% market share between Amazon and eMusic, along with iTunes’ >80% doesn’t leave more than 5% for any other players in the USA: with just those three selling your music for you online, you’ve got 95% of the market covered. It’s not that the remaining 5% isn’t worth catering to, but the law of diminishing returns kicks in, and customers in the last few percentiles get harder and harder to chase down, especially given the plethora of blossoming and failing little music shops that appear and dissappear. We concentrate our efforts on the vendors that matter.
P.S.
The controversial bulk of music discovery and consumption in the electronic wilderness, outside the paid-for enclosure, is happening on torrent sites like the embattled Pirate Bay, and the more respectable Limewire and Mininova, and promoting RouteNote artists on these channels is something we’re looking into. Ubiquitous innovator Trent Reznor or NIN positively encourages people to download his music from P2P networks, in order to drive sales of his ‘premium’ paid for content.
Have you ever wondered how much iTunes account for digital sales online? One of our competitors CD Baby has published their 2008 results which shows that iTunes currently accounts for over 82% of their total digital revenues. This makes me wonder why artists are really keen to get their music in as many places as possible, instead of just focusing on the top retail points and building a base around them and their users.
It’s been another record breaking month for sales as RouteNote.com grows from strength to strength.
Sales statistics for January 2009 have now been finalised, so be sure to check in on how your music is doing!
A big thank you to all account holders for your continued support and patience whilst we continue to close deals and develop the website.
Signed,
The RouteNote Team
