Don't take my word for it that the major labels and the system that propped them up for so many years are dead. John Mellencamp, who sang a string of rock hits back in the 1980s and '90s, thinks the business is dead as well. In an articulate and passionate essay on the Huffington Post, he argues that the long slide started well before the rise of file sharing, back to when the business started relying on SoundScan and Broadcast Data Systems (BDS).
The old way of selling music is as outdated as '80s hairstyles.
(Credit: John Cougar Mellencamp via YouTube)With SoundScan, instead of relying on surveys from record stores, the labels could see exactly how many units were being moved in any given week, and where those sales were happening. With BDS, instead of relying on phone calls to radio program directors, the labels knew exactly how many spins a song was receiving in each city. Shortly thereafter, the Billboard charts began relying on these automated systems as well. The result: labels ignored the vast majority of the country and focused on a few hits that were getting airplay in the largest cities, and allocated their A&R and marketing budgets accordingly. We ended up, according to Mellencamp, with No. 1 hits that most of the country had never heard, and the rest was a long downhill slide to today's hyperfragmented and piracy-ridden market.
It's a great essay, and I particularly like his side note that the CD was created out of pure greed, as a way to get users to replace their collections of perfectly good vinyl records. (Remember how CDs were supposed to offer clear sound forever? Funny, my CDs from the early 1990s are already wearing out and skipping, but I have records from the 1950s that still play adequately.)
But like the folks at Idolator, who called Mellencamp old and dumb, I completely disagree with his conclusion. Mellencamp says that the irrelevance of radio and fragmentation of the market means there's no organic way for music to find an audience and grow. That's completely wrong--there's more opportunity for smaller bands today than there's ever been. Yes, beginning artists might have to do more work themselves, but recording, manufacturing, and distributing an album has never been cheaper or easier. From ProTools to Disc Makers to CD Baby and Tunecore, and more recent competitors like Routenote and Audiolife, these are tools that anybody can use and master. Sure, online marketing through vehicles like MySpace can't compete with mass radio play in 100 cities, but it's available to anybody--not just the companies' chosen few. When you get a bit bigger, you can enlist services like Topspin to hype your product in the digital realm, for far cheaper than an old-fashioned media blitz. Even getting gigs no longer requires a booking agent, thanks to services like Sonicbids.
In one sense, Mellencamp's right: if you're in music to become a rock star, now's a bad time to be a musician. But if you want to have your music heard as broadly as possible, there's never been a better time.
And for those of you who couldn't sing the chorus to Mellencamp's "I Need A Lover" when you read his essay, click here.
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Update, Thursday 1/30: Today, I received a followup e-mail from Audiolife CEO and co-founder Brandon Hance. Audiolife has changed its cut on digital album downloads from $3.50 to $3.00, and on digital singles from $0.35 to $0.30. The company has also posted a detailed price list, including prices for different configurations of t-shirts. I've modified the original post accordingly.
I stumbled across a new service on Wednesday that, at first glance, seems to trump CD Baby for selling CDs online.Audiolife not only lets you create an online store to sell CDs and digital downloads, but it will actually manufacture the CDs for you, on-demand, as customers buy them. The up-front cost? Nothing. Zero dollars and zero cents.
This is a big deal. As any self-financed musician knows, CD manufacturing is a big investment. Print runs for CDs with a jewel case and nice color insert generally start at 1,000 for close to $1,000, though you can get away with spending a few hundred bucks for a short run, if you're willing to pay quite a bit more per disc. This is all well and good, if you sell all of the CDs you print. If not, you're left with some expensive drink coasters.
Instead of charging you up front, Audiolife takes $5.49 from the sale of each physical CD. That's slightly more than CD Baby, which charges a $35 one-time fee, plus $4 per CD sold. But, of course, CD Baby assumes that you've already paid to manufacture CDs.
Audiofile will also let you design and sell T-shirts (they keep at least $4.82 per shirt, depending on the type of shirt) with no minimum purchase, and create and sell ringtones either from MIDI files or samples of the actual song (they'll pass along 50 cents per download, but the phone company sets prices). The online store isn't a static Web site, but rather a widget that you can place on your band's home page, or on social-networking sites like MySpace, which is still a necessity for musicians (though it's been surpassed in total users by Facebook).
If you're only interested in digital distribution, Audiolife may not be the best deal. They take a cut of $3.00 of each album download and $0.30 of each single-song download sold through your online store, and don't distribute them to third-party stores like iTunes. In contrast, CD Baby lets you keep 91% of all revenues from downloads, minus its one-time up-front payment of $35 and any fees from third-party stores, and Tunecore takes no cut but forces you to pay an annual fee of $10 per song or $20 per album. Both of these services will redistribute your songs through major stores such as iTunes.
I've read through the Audiolife FAQ, and I can't find any obvious gotchas--artists retain the rights to their music, deals are nonexclusive with other distribution sites, and their bulk price list looks pretty competitive with Disc Makers, if you want to buy a bunch of CDs to sell at shows, give away in press kits, or send to radio stations.
With no up-front costs or exclusivity contracts, there's not much to lose--if you find out that Audiolife isn't serving you well, you're free to move on.
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