Pandora is a great music-discovery service, so it's only natural that independent bands would hope to get their music placed on it. Unfortunately for them, Pandora just made that a little harder--and a little more expensive.
As I first saw on the Digital Audio Insider blog a couple weeks ago, Pandora recently changed its music submission process, and is now accepting solicitations only from bands who have a physical CD for sale through Amazon.com. That requires the artist to manufacture a CD with proper album art and bar code, which is much more expensive than creating a bunch of MP3s, and to pay Amazon $29.95 a year to participate in the Amazon Advantage program; Amazon then takes a 55 percent cut of the list price of the CD.
This shouldn't hurt too many artists--serious musicians want their CDs to turn up in a search on the world's largest retailer, and probably have a relationship with Amazon anyway. But you were planning on using CD Baby or another site exclusively, or hoping to save money with an online-only release, don't count on Pandora as a marketing mechanism for your music.
Back in January, I criticized Palm for not having a reasonable music strategy for the upcoming Pre, the touch-screen superphone that could save the company. At that time, I mocked Palm for suggesting that consumers would have to drag and drop music files from their PC to the Pre, which would appear as a mass storage device. As I wrote, "without iTunes, there's no iPhone. And without the iPhone, there's no consumer smartphone audience." (Users will also be able to buy downloads over the air with an Amazon MP3 client, but the vast majority of music on portable devices comes from the user's computer, not downloads.)
It looks like Palm took my criticism to heart: Thursday at the D7: All Things D conference, the company demonstrated the Pre and announced that its media sync capability would be built around...iTunes. That's right: when you plug the phone into your computer and hit the "media sync" button, it will launch iTunes and begin letting you transfer any DRM-free files to the phone. You'll still be able use iTunes to rip and store and organize your music, to sync it with any iPods you have, and to buy downloads. Why try to reinvent the wheel and risk disaster? Heck, why not go all the way and let iPhone applications run on the thing as well?
There's only one problem: what if Apple decides that it doesn't want a competitor using the software it built and developed? Could Apple force Palm into the sort of arms race that RealNetworks experienced when it tried to reverse-engineer iTunes' DRM scheme?
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As expected, Apple on Tuesday introduced variable pricing on iTunes, meaning that some popular tracks now cost $1.29 instead of $0.99. Less expected: Amazon.com has followed Apple into the fray. Scroll down today's list of top downloads, and you'll see a few tracks at $1.29.
I just stopped believing.
It was only a matter of time, but I didn't expect the price hike to come on the same day, given all the noise Amazon's been making about a special promotion in the U.K. (0.29 pounds for some selected track, down from the usual minimum of 0.59). I can't imagine Amazon's excited about raising prices in a recession--they're probably responding to price increases by the record labels, which were made possible by Apple's capitulation. Good luck with that!
Update at 9:45 a.m. Wednesday: It's not just Amazon. I heard from a contact at another large online music company that the impetus behind the new pricing models is indeed coming from the labels. Apparently, they approached all the major stores and asked them to begin selling certain songs for $1.29 on Tuesday.
Check out Rhapsody and Wal-Mart (which is selling tracks for $1.24, in keeping with its "5 cents cheaper" pricing strategy).
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Every now and then, the traditional record industry comes up with a win-win for all involved. Take for example today's announcement from Amazon.com of a new service called Back from the Vault, which offers out-of-print albums for sale as CDs or MP3s.
(Credit:
Amazon.com)
The key to the program is Amazon subsidiary CreateSpace, which manufacturers individual CDs as users demand them--very similar to part of the service Audiolife provides for independent musicians. (CreateSpace also lets musicians self-publish, and provides similar services for books and video.) In this case, more than 20 record labels have contracted with CreateSpace to make more than 1,000 long-discontinued CDs available through Amazon's store; customers can also buy MP3s of the same albums.
The program's deepest in the jazz category, with nearly 300 titles from the likes of Wayne Shorter and McCoy Tyner, but it also has quite a deep bed of alternative rock, and random nuggets like Ennio Morricone's soundtrack to the Adrian Lyne version of "Lolita."
This is a triple win: record companies and artists get to sell more of their back catalog without having to keep warehouses full of seldom-sold CDs, Amazon increases its long-tail appeal, and music fans have another avenue to buy previously unavailable music.
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Cheap tools to help independent musicians sell their music online are proliferating like mushrooms after a rainstorm: last month I wrote about Audiolife, which gives bands an online store to sell CDs and merchandise with absolutely no up-front costs (they take a cut of sales as you make them). Since then, Audiolife was kind enough to send me a sample CD and t-shirts, and they look and sound adequately professional--certainly fine for independent musicians on a limited budget, although nobody's going to confuse them with the deluxe version of the latest U2 album.
Upload your files to iTunes and other major online music stores with no up-front costs.
(Credit: RouteNote)But Audiolife's download store is a little weak: instead of placing your songs in Apple's iTunes store--which accounts for more than 80 percent of online music sales--and other high-profile venues like Amazon's MP3 store, Audiolife creates a widget that you can place on your own Web page or social-networking site. That's fine if you've got a lot of fans already visiting your Web site. But what about more general music fans who often shop for music online, but wouldn't go out of their way to go to your Web site--think friends of friends, or music lovers who read about new bands online or in a paper. Do you really want them to come up blank when they run a search on iTunes?
CD Baby and Tunecore already offer digital distribution through iTunes and other stores, but both of them charge you money whether you make a sale or not. In contrast, U.K.-based RouteNote charges you nothing until you make a sale, at which point they take a 10 percent cut of whatever the store pays out.
Specifics: CDBaby charges you a one-time set-up fee of $35 (which covers setting up a store for physical CDs as well), then takes 9 percent of digital download revenues. TuneCore, which does digital distribution only (no CDs) charges you $20 a year for each album they stock, but takes no cut. So on a straight numbers basis, RouteNote's a better deal than CD Baby for digital-only distribution, and a better deal than TuneCore if you expect to sell low volumes of downloads. Of course, there are a lot of other factors to consider, like customer service and speed of submission to iTunes and the other stores, but RouteNote looks like it's worth checking out.
eMusic users awoke Friday to a redesign of the subscription-based download site, which specializes in music from independent artists. The main feature is a recommendation engine provided by MediaUnbound, which uses a combination of computer algorithms and real live music fans to duplicate the services of that one friend of yours who always seems to know about the new bands first. MediaUnbound CEO Michael Papish had this funny exchange with TechCrunch in which he explained why his company's technology is better than Pandora and other recommendation engines, although the TechCrunch reviewer remained unconvinced.
I never get past this step.
It sounds intriguing, and I'm sure that eMusic's 400,000-plus users will enjoy playing with it. But every time I think to check the service out, I'm stymied by its sign-up process. The front page is useless, offering almost no insight into what eMusic offers. It's very hard to browse or search to see what songs are on the service, much less sample them--the only way I could get to the store was by clicking on the "Audiobooks" link at the bottom of the page, then selecting the "Browse" tab. You can't test the new recommendation engine. This page listing reasons to join just doesn't do the trick. Neither does this page listing a handful of free samples, seemingly chosen at random.
This aggressive approach to getting sign-ups may have been OK when free music was hard to come by and when iTunes and other music stores trafficked only in DRM-encrusted files. But with sites like Imeem offering free streaming of entire songs, and Amazon.com letting you search among millions of MP3 tracks from major labels as well as indies, the redirects to the sign-up screen are a real turn-off. I don't understand why eMusic doesn't just make the sample version of the store the front page, then guide users to the sign-up page when they try to download something--just like Amazon or any other Web-based music store.
If you're a gearhead and have a bunch of MP3 players from different companies, the Amazon MP3 Store is your best source for buying music downloads. It's the only store in which all tracks are unprotected MP3s, meaning they can be played on any player and in any software. (Microsoft's Zune Marketplace is getting close, but you need to download and install the Zune software to access that store, while Amazon is accessible from any browser.)
Yesterday, Amazon took a step toward making its store a place you might actually want to spend some time, rather than downloading your tunes and getting out. There are now 70,000 dedicated artist pages, each with a list of physical CDs for sale, most popular MP3 downloads, biographies from AMG, and listener-contributed information from SoundUnwound (an offshoot of Amazon's IMDb). If an artist has a store, it shows up at the top of search results--a nice touch given how haphazard Amazon's search results can be.
This isn't a new concept at all; iTunes has had dedicated artist pages for ages, and they're the centerpiece of MySpace Music. But you can't buy a physical album, DVD, or book from iTunes or MySpace.
The great draw of portable MP3 players is quantity.
I remember when my wife and I took a six-month backpacking trip back in 1999. We never even considered bringing an MP3 player, which might have had a whopping 64MB of flash memory, enough for about a hour of audio compressed at 256kbps. Instead, we brought a Discman and about two dozen CDs in a soft case. We grew extremely bored with those CDs and ended up jettisoning or trading most of them.
Today, you'd laugh if somebody told you they were considering bringing CDs on a trip--why would you, when all but the most hardcore collectors could fit their entire music collection onto a hard-drive based player like the 120GB iPod Classic? I've even taken a stand against the audiophiles who decry MP3s and compressed audio--I think portability is worth the quality loss you have to endure, as long as you occasionally listen to uncompressed (or better, live) music to remind yourself how great it can sound.
But I've always assumed that this is a temporary state of affairs. Kryder's Law--which says that density of data on magnetic discs will approximately double each year--is presumably going to continue, and advances in flash-based storage could lead to an exponential jump in capacity. Of course, we'll all be listening to lossless files on our portable player someday. Right?
That's why it surprised me when a report by Todd Bishop--a former Microsoft reporter for one of Seattle's daily papers, who recently helped start a new Seattle-based tech site called TechFlash--cited representatives from Amazon's MP3 store and Rhapsody saying that they weren't really thinking about lossless music.
Selling lossless files won't make sense for the next year or two because of space constraints and the fact that many players (such as the iPod Shuffle) can't play them. But what about in 5, 6, 10 years? Don't you think kids who grew up with compressed files would switch to better quality audio if it cost the same amount? Don't you think they would notice the difference?
I think so. And Microsoft apparently does too. A Zune representative told Bishop she has a hunch that lossless audio will become extremely important in the future (although today's Zunes don't support playback of any audio at a higher bitrate than 320kbps, meaning they won't play back any lossless files). Her stance is in keeping with Microsoft's corporate culture, which has always bet on the next generation of hardware. With the exception of Vista, which received a media drubbing in part because of the steep hardware requirements for the Premium versions, most of the time this has turned out to be the right bet.
Correction: AC/DC's 1981 album For Those About to Rock We Salute You peaked at #1 on the U.S. charts, which means Wal-Mart's press release is wrong.
American retail giant Wal-Mart relaunched its online MP3 store Tuesday, and it's a worthy competitor to Amazon in the DRM-free MP3 sweepstakes. (To remind you: unlike many songs from Apple's iTunes, or Microsoft's Zune Marketplace, or Nokia's music store, every song sold on Amazon and Wal-Mart can be played an unlimited number of times on just about any portable device and in any software application out there.)
The new Wal-Mart store includes top hits at only 74 a cents per song, with standard pricing at 94 cents (a nickel cheaper than most), plus a free download of the week (hopefully it won't always be kids' music), plus one free MP3 download for every full physical album that you buy either in the store or on the Web site starting in November.
Highlights of Wal-Mart's relaunched MP3 store include exclusives, a free song of the week, and selected downloads for only $0.74
(Credit: Screenshot)But no AC/DC. If you're of a certain age and musical predeliction, you probably already know that AC/DC's new album, Black Ice, is available only at Wal-Mart--but not as a download. You might have checked out the new single, "Rock and Roll Train," for its first minute or two. But you probably would never have guessed that Black Ice has just become AC/DC's second album to top the U.S. charts, showing that big old rock bands don't need none of that digital computer stuff anyhow. At least they have a sense of humor about it.
The run-up to the holiday season always begins in September, and while I was overseas with no Internet access, the music and technology industries kept on churning. Fortunately for me, nothing's really changed. To wit:
SanDisk, in collaboration with the four major labels, announced a new physical format for albums called SlotMusic. You'll be able to pay between $7 and $10 and get a full album on a MicroSD card, which you'll then be able to plug into compatible cellphones or MP3 players to begin playing the MP3 files encoded at 320kbps. This one boggles me. If you need a physical artifact, CDs still exist, they play in billions of devices (car, computer, home stereo), they offer much higher quality sound, they have liner notes, and anybody with enough tech knowledge to know what a MicroSD card is can certainly figure out how to rip a CD to their hard drive and transfer the songs to an MP3 player. So why would I pay a dime for a tiny, easy-to-misplace "album" that offers lower-quality sound and compatibility with far fewer devices? Next.
MySpace Music launched with the support of the four major labels. This one has a huge built-in userbase, but the distribution model's all wrong: label-driven and top-down, unlike Imeem, where users post all the music. If I want to hear a song on demand--to see if I like a particular band, or just to satisfy a moment of curiosity--I'll go to the site with the largest selection, which is likely to be Imeem. If I want to buy a song, I'll do it in the store affiliated with my MP3 player of choice--iTunes, Zune Marketplace or (if I must) Amazon MP3. So what's the point of this service again, other than a too-little too-late attempt by the labels to capitalize on the MySpace name? Next.
Google and T-Mobile announced and demonstrated the first phone based on Google's Android operating system, the T-Mobile G1, manufactured by HTC. It's an obvious bid to compete in the consumer smartphone market, which was first tapped by Apple with the iPhone (before that, smartphones were generally business devices--think Blackberry and Windows Mobile). To compete in that space, there has to be an iTunes equivalent, so it's going to ship with a mobile music player that connects to a mobile version of Amazon's MP3 store. Call me a skeptic. I've tried the Amazon store and found it to be an exercise in frustration. So without having seen the G1 in person, I'm going to go out on a limb and predict that, at launch, the Amazon/Android app's going to fall way short of iTunes when it comes to ease of use. Give it a couple revs to catch up, but at launch, this won't change the competitive picture.
