distribute

In this bonus episode of the MP3 Insider, I interview TuneCore's founder Jeff Price about the state of online music distribution and TuneCore's role in providing indie musicians and labels a one-stop solution for selling music through iTunes, Amazon MP3, eMusic, and other online music stores.

If you're an independent musician trying to figure out how to sell your music online without getting screwed, Jeff offers a ton of great information in this interview, including online payout rates from major retailers, how to use iTunes trending reports to plan tours, and the power of creative recording.

There's also a great story in here about TuneCore's leveraging of Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud and other scalable infrastructure services, for taking uploaded songs and automatically reformatting them for all the different online retail requirements. Who knew cloud drones could help you sell music?

Listen now: Download today's podcast… Read more

Updated 2:30 p.m., with comment from Microsoft.

It had become a ritual for Microsoft's consumer unit. Every year it came out with a new version of Microsoft Money and sent new boxes to retail stores.

That tradition is now dead.

Microsoft, via a newsgroup posting from one of its enthusiasts, announced it will no longer update Money each year and, more importantly, it will stop selling the product at retail stores.

It's the latest indication that Microsoft is seeing a shift in the way people, particularly consumers and small businesses, buy their software.

"More and … Read more

Most musicians want to concentrate on writing, performing, and recording. The first two are like breathing and eating, and the third has become much easier in the last decade thanks to the ongoing revolution in digital technology--you can set up a decent computer-based recording studio for a few thousand bucks. But once you're done recording, then what? For artists without a record label, promotion and distribution are two of the thorniest tasks--they take a lot of time, and you learn a lot of lessons (and meet a lot of rip-off artists) in the process.

Launched today, HyperDIY attempts to … Read more

Sony Pictures Television has signed a distribution deal with pioneering Web series Rocketboom, which has been producing a quirky daily newscast since 2004.

Under the terms of the agreement--which reports pin in the seven figures--Sony will handle all distribution and ad sales, as well as use its Crackle.com player on the Rocketboom.com Web site. (Until this point, Rocketboom has used a YouTube embed on its home page.) It'll also see additional distribution on Sony's network, which includes the PlayStation 3 console.

Sony bought Crackle, then known as Grouper, back in 2006.

Created by entrepreneur Andrew … Read more

Say you just captured an amazing video of your cat doing something funny. It's time to upload it to YouTube right? Why stop there? HeySpread, a service from the folks at Particles was just updated Thursday morning to take the video you just captured and push it out to nearly 20 different video hosts at once.

Better yet, it keeps track of the views once they're there. You can view each video with daily-stats analytics, view breakdowns, and comparison charts to see how the same video is doing on different services. It'll also let you compare it … Read more

Google has enlisted Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane to create an original animated series that it will distribute on the Web via its AdSense advertising system, according to The New York Times.

Google plans to use AdSense to syndicate the program--called Seth MacFarlane's Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy--to thousands of Web sites that are popular with MacFarlane's target audience, according to the newspaper. Advertising will be incorporated via "preroll" ads, banner ads, or "brought to you by" ads, according to the report.

MacFarlane is also reportedly working with advertisers to create original advertising to run … Read more

SoundCloud is a service for musicians to distribute their music to one another, and eventually the public. It's not a marketplace like iTunes or Amazon though; instead it's a sharing network for musicians looking to hock their demos and get feedback on early tracks. You might be saying to yourself "doesn't MySpace do all that?" Well sort of, but the big difference is that SoundCloud is its own social network and offers more control over where tracks go as well as what bits of metadata come along for the ride.

The entire experience revolves around … Read more

A correction was made to this story. See details below.

Here's hoping that Netflix managers have the confidence to carry on with a plan that isn't just necessary for growth, but is essential to the company's survival.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings is being second guessed by Michael Pachter, an analyst with Wedbush Morgan Securities. According to a story in Portfolio (via Wired.com), Pachter "would prefer that Netflix stick to selling movie-rental subscriptions."

Like many on Wall Street, Pachter can't see past the next quarter. He crunched the numbers and argues that Netflix is … Read more

"The difference between the optimist and the pessimist is that the pessimist has more facts," said Jean-Paul Betb?ze, Chief Economist and Head of Economic Research Department, Cr?dit Agricole S.A., in a panel at the Millken Institute's Global Conference 2008 in Los Angeles a couple of weeks ago. True as this may be, his statement stood in sharp contrast to the overall vibe of the event: Yes, we can, was the prevailing sentiment, and the overwhelming majority of attendees would probably have outed themselves as fervent optimists, despite an abundance of fact-featuring PowerPoint slides supporting … Read more