Archive for: 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.
Bandcamp has just announced that their service will now be receiving a percentage of all sales. Bandcamp will now charge 15% on all sales as a transaction fee, dropping to 10% as soon as an artist, management or label’s all-time sales exceed $5,000.
In the past six months, Bandcamp says that they’ve sold more $1 million in music and merch directly to fans. Last week Zoe Keating hit #7 on the Billboard Classical chart from the strength of her Bandcamp sales alone.
“It’s been awesome to witness,” according to Bandcamp founder Ethan Diamond. “And we’re amped to carry right on, full steam ahead, building out new features, honing existing ones, strengthening our infrastructure, and generally making things better and better. Perhaps most importantly though, we want to do so in a way that’s sustainable long-term.”
Even though Limewire is being sued by pretty much every major music corporation, they are planning a subscription based music service. Thats right, Limewire is going legit.
Limewire in essences is planning a direct Spotify competitor.
“Users will have complete and instant access to their entire library and catalog across their desktop, devices, and in the cloud,” a company executive relayed. “By syncing iTunes playlists and content to the cloud, users’ existing libraries are available to access and stream to a wide range of connected devices.”
Of course, major labels (and publishers) are suing this company with a passion. But according to LimeWire, label executives are also supporting the post-gavel initiative. ”We can confirm that in our ongoing dialogues with numerous industry executives, this service has been very well received,” another LimeWire source relayed.
The Limewire service is scheduled to launch late in 2010, but we will see if it works out.
HMV Japan will be closing their flagship retail store in Tokyo’s Shibuyu district on August 22. This move really shows the collapse of the physical market, not just in Japan but all over the world.
The Shibuya outlet, opened in 1990, was the first HMV store in Japan and, with approximately 6,400 square feet (600 sq m.) of floor space, the largest. HMV Japan shut a Tokyo outlet in the busy Shinjuku district, located in the upscale Takashimaya department store, on Jan. 6, 2010. Forty retail stores will remain for HMV Japan after the August closures.
They’ve not announced a specific date, but Business Week are carrying this story, in which Senior Vice President Paul Brown claims they’re in talks with various ISP’s, web hosting companies and mobile providers to co-ordinate service provision in the States before the year is out:
“We’re buying server space in random parts of the states and there are licensing discussions too,” Brown said “But they are going fine because we’re in a long-term partnership with the labels and publishers.”
They are also in discussions to port their smartphone app, that’s currently on Android and the iPhone onto the BlackBerry and Palm Inc. smartphones – a small but significant expansion of their customer appeal. Expansion into the USA will see a big jump in Spotify’s user numbers, which will necessitate improvement in their per-user revenue figures unless they are to start losing huge amounts of money. It’s for this reason that they have been restricting signups in Europe, so perhaps there’s a new model or a magic bullet, or perhaps they’re just bullish about the steady increase in their ad revenues being able to fully fund a free user by the time they’re ready to launch in the new territory.
Either way, if you’re an indie musician, sign up with RouteNote and we’ll get your music on Spotify for you ahead of their expansion.
Spotify currently boasts 7 million users, all of them in Europe. Not bad for a product that was only released in October 2008 – this figure does only relate to the number of people on their free service, but their £10 a month premium service is also gaining traffic at a remarkable rate; they had “more than 250,000″ premium users on 23rd Jan ’10, and are now boasting 320,000 paid subscribers, (as of the 17th March ’10), and increase of 28% in under 3 months, and an extra £8,400,000 a year into the coffers. Spotify still needs to up their percentages though, according to UMG’s [Universal Music Group's] SVP [Senior Vice President] Rob Wells [and they would know, because they've taken shares in the business], they need to have around 10%-12% of their users as premium subscribers [they're currently at about 5%] to have a viable business in the long term. This might change as more and more advertising dollars go online though – as both Spotify’s CEO Daniel Ek and industry analysts Kantar Media are saying:
[Table via TechCrunch's article on the same]. Other interesting facts are that 15% to 18% of the Swedish population use Spotify – and the Swedish music industry’s revenues are up, and that Spotify’s p2p based system is actually using more interwebs than the whole nation of Sweden. There are rumours of a Spotify set-top box and/or home stereo system, a bit like that Sonos thing, but running off your Spotify premium account.
Other signs of Spotify’s ambition came from comments about Apple – Ek described them as having a freemium model like Spotify’s, as everyone (in his opinion) downloads a lot of free stuff and then buys the stuff they really like on iTunes:
“The vast majority of people’s libraries are free from Limewire or trading through friends. And then there’s a small portion of tracks that they’ve bought… I really believe that if music could be legally available on any device that you wanted… I think the music industry would be radically bigger than what it is today”.
He also thinks that Apple will change the way that iTunes works, to allow remote access from anywhere to your iTunes music account on a cloud: “People want to share, to access independently. I think it makes a lot of sense for them to do something in that area.”
Not to be outdone by streaming competitors Spotify, who are rumoured to have gained a new funding partner (and consultant) in the form of Napster/Facebook founder Sean Parker, MOG have announced second round funding of $10,000,000 dollars, which they plan to use to take the platform into Europe, as well as funding Stateside expansion. As things stand, the two competitors are entrenching in their home territories, but the date of their confrontation on one side of the Atlantic must be drawing closer, even though no dates have been mentioned by either team. MOG’s monthly subscription is less than half the price of Spotify’s, but Spotify has major label backing, plus a vocal and passionate fanbase. Pandora are keeping their heads down, and quietly getting on with dominating the internet-radio and car dashboard scene, but the clash between these two will likely define the major player in on-demand streaming. The future of this type of music consumption is far from gilt-edged, however, as Spotify are still struggling to up their paid (£9.99 a month) subscription rates to supplement their ad-funded service, while MOG are operating at about a 17% conversion rate from their free trial to a $5 a month subscription. Whether either of these approaches will be successful enough to fund them in the long term remains to be seen, but given the high level of uptake, there is certainly a market for on-demand. Who gets to service it is currently being decided.
It has been reported over at Techcrunch that UK music retailer HMV has announced at its AGM that they will be buying a 50 percent stake in online music retailer 7Digital for £7.7 million. The move looks set to give HMV a ‘great leap forward’ in digital, since 7Digital has been fleet of foot in pushing non-DRM MP3s, open formats and signed deals with tech rock stars like Spotify. CEO Ben Drury, CTO James Kane and other managers are staying on and will be joined by three more from HMV on the JV board.
HMV Group will now use the five year-old 7Digital as its sole supplier for “all of its existing digital operations” in the UK and Canada. 7Digital will also be used to build a new e-books and audiobooks store for HMV’s Waterstones subsidiary, an area previously untouched by 7Digital. HMV’s own effort, GetCloser.com, has bombed, so this deal probably couldn’t come soon enough.
It is great to see that HMV is actually trying new model and markets. It was even reported a month or so ago that HMV had signed their first ever band to a record label, The Boxer Rebellion.
A few days ago it was reported that eMusic has come to a deal with Sony to add their catalogue. However, there has been a lot of reaction from this new deal for eMusic, because this is the first major record label eMusic has added. Hypebot has a great preview of the service and then some interesting reactions that have been voiced on the eMusic message boards.
Jellybones: Thank you eMusic. Its been a good run here for me. I love emusic, been here over 5 years. But I can’t afford my tracks to be cut by 2/3 for the same price.
90 downloads will become 35. Sorry, not worth it for the selection. I can go buy a couple albums (maybe only 2 instead of 3) but I can get exactly what I want.
Kez RE: I feel sold out. It seems eMusic is enraptured with the dazzle of their future customer-trolls and have cast aside their loyal member base.
From the UK xtrev: As noted down in the bowels of the ‘Major label…’ thread, the new more expensive price plans have appeared on site today. Including Booster prices. Damn.
Don’t think I’ll be buying many more 50 track boosters at 20.99 UK pounds. That’s a HUGE increase over the previous 14.99. If this is an example of what it means to have major label content here, then frankly they can shove it.
btx: Except for very rare circumstances, I’m not particularly interested in giving my cash to the major labels, that’s why I come here. If it is going to cost me more for their presence [even if I should choose not to download their stuff], that may be the end for me.
d.w.: “Effective Jul 6, 2009, your plan will change to the new eMusic Plus plan which gives you 37 downloads for $14.99 every 30 days.
We’re sorry that we’ve had to retire your current plan, but we’re confident that you’ll find even more music to love among the many new additions to the music catalog. And of course, you can always choose a different plan by visiting the Plan Options page within Your Account.”
My current plan is (grandfathered) 65 tracks per month for $14.99. This means that your Sony deal results in a 100% per track price increase over what I’m paying currently.
I appreciate(?) that you’ll be adding a lot of music from major labels that I could frankly not give a crap about (Alicia Keys — really?), but literally halving the amount of tracks I get on my current plan is a bit much to take. I’ve been a subscriber since 2000, but I am seriously considering canceling at this point.
eMusic is one of our great partners here at RouteNote and I would have rather seen the service stay with the indie industry and not attach themselves to the major labels, but now it seems like there is a new opportunity in the market for another indie service.
