I've written about TuneCore many times in the past: it's a service for independent musicians that submits their recordings to iTunes, Amazon MP3, and other big online stores--and it's helping some artists make a good deal of money.
The fees are quite reasonable; they top out around $20 a year, although the precise pricing depends on what you're submitting and how many stores you want it in--and artists have had some substantial financial success using it. Earlier this month, an unsigned hip-hop artist named Drake sold 300,000 copies of his single through TuneCore in just 14 days; The New York Times listed him as having the No. 3 download in the U.S. For those of you keeping track at home, that probably means the artist earned around $150,000 in two weeks--that's take-home money, not a label advance that needs to be earned back through future sales.
(Credit:
TuneCore)
Drake's story is instructive: days after distributing the single through TuneCore, he signed a deal with the world's largest record label, Universal. Today, TuneCore announced its own deal with Universal; specifically, the TuneCore Store will resell services offered by Universal Music Group Distribution, such as mastering (the final step in a professional audio production) and album art. Guitar Center, a massive guitar retailer with more than 200 stores, will also cooperate with Universal Distribution to sell physical CDs by TuneCore artists at its stores.
But the real opportunity is more subtle. You have to ask what a big label like Universal gets out of the deal. Simple: this is a way to discover independent artists without doing the traditional boots-on-the-ground work of an A&R (artist and repertoire) representative. If a TuneCore customer buys Universal services, and then turns out to be a hot-seller, the artist and the label already have a relationship on which to build. Big-label contracts aren't--and shouldn't be--the goal of every indie musician, but for those who want a shot at reaching a large audience fast and are willing to give up some control to do so, they're still tempting.
Talk about a race to the bottom: a week after I pondered which digital music distribution service was cheapest, WaTunes made the question irrelevant by offering digital distribution for free. That's right--for no money down and no cut of the royalties, WaTunes promises to distribute your digital downloads to iTunes, Amazon's MP3 store, Rhapsody, eMusic, and Rhapsody.
(Credit:
WaTunes)
So how does the company expect to make money? The answer became clear this week when WaTunes launched its premium-priced service, WaTunes VIP. For $29.95 a year, artists and labels will get distribution to more stores (including the Zune Marketplace), the ability to upload videos, unlimited weekly trend reports from iTunes, and a number of other perks outlined on the WaTunes blog.
Just remember: there's more to consider than price. Of the big distributors I've covered, only CD Baby offers you an online storefront for physical CDs as well as digital distribution, and The Orchard is more of a full-service digital record label, handling tasks such as marketing and licensing in addition to distribution.
Meanwhile, "pure" digital distribution services like TuneCore and RouteNote may have to add other services to remain competitive.
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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.
Music industry blog Coolfer has an interesting post this week about online tools for do-it-yourself musicians in which he points to a relatively new service called Speakerheart. I checked out the service, and while I agree with his assessment of the interface--it's based on Adobe's Flex (an offshoot of Flash) and is very slick and easy to use--I think that Speakerheart, like most other digital distribution start-ups, is going to have a very hard time.
An example of a Speakerheart shelf on the MySpace page of Nashville band The Bird Ensemble.
(Credit: Speakerheart; The Bird Ensemble)The process is pretty straightforward: Artists sign up with Speakerheart to sell their songs through a digital storefront on the site. Artists have complete pricing discretion, but Speakerheart takes $0.25 per song. Speakerheart's big differentiator, though, are the widgets (known as "Shelves") that offer streaming samples ("Speakers") and the ability for listeners to bookmark songs that they like ("Hearts"). Musicians and fans can place these Shelves on any site that accepts Flash, including MySpace pages. For artists, the idea is that users will be able to stumble across your music on a wide variety of sites, sample your music, then proceed to your storefront to buy a song or two.
The problem with Speakerheart and other digital distribution start-ups is a lack of critical mass. Artists with labels or a significant fanbase don't need the service--they can sell digital downloads through their own site or the label's site. In either case, they (or their label overlords) will keep a greater percentage of the sales price. That means that Speakerheart will continue to draw relatively obscure acts, which means that few listeners will have any reason to visit the site or place widgets on their personal pages, which will keep the service too obscure to draw any acts with a significant fanbase, and so on--a sort of obscurity death cycle. The only way to break this cycle would be for Speakerheart to get a few name-brand artists to place their songs with the service, but that requires big marketing bucks or a lot of luck (a formerly obscure Speakerheart artist becoming the next U2, for example).
The folks at Speakerheart might say "But look at other services that started with independent artists, like eMusic and CD Baby--if they can do it, why can't we?"
In the case of eMusic, the site had first-mover advantage: it's been around for almost 10 years (!), and has been able to sign up a lot of independent labels with rosters including multiple acts. With 2.8 million songs available, fans of independent music already know to look there, and new labels (or the aggregators that serve them, like The Orchard) strive to get their music placed there. With CD Baby, the service started by fulfilling a difficult role for most artists--online distribution of physical CDs, including packaging, shipping, tracking, payment processing, and so on--and only later expanded into a digital aggregator (placing its artists' music on services like iTunes) and direct digital distributor (selling MP3s on its own artist sites).
My point: if you're a beginning artist, I still think the best recipe for success is to give full downloadable samples away on your home page or MySpace, then sell your music through a service like CDBaby or TuneCore (another aggregator that resells your music through iTunes and other services). You've got to go where the people are.
Hip hop giants Public Enemy will release their next album via digital distributor TuneCore, according to a story in yesterday's New York Times.
As a musician who's recorded a lot of CDs with unsigned bands, I'm a longtime fan of CD Baby, which provides an online store for selling physical CDs, as well as digital distribution through iTunes and other online services. How do the services compare for digital distribution?
CD Baby charges a one-time $35 fee for each album you want to sell through them (digital or physical), and takes a 9% cut of each download. TuneCore charges about the same amount up-front (although it will vary depending on how many songs are on an album and how many stores you want to sell your music through), and charges an additional $20 per album per year. But they never take a cut of any sales.
If you're a relative unknown with a local fanbase and minimal tours, you might sell 100 tracks in a year. From each of those downloads, you'll probably earn about $0.60 of the $0.99 that most sites, including iTunes, charge. Sixty bucks. CD Baby takes 9%, leaving you with $54. TuneCore's always going to be better in that first year, as they let you keep the full $60.
But in the 2nd year, you'll pay TuneCore $20 per album regardless of whether it sells or not. Or you'll pay CD Baby 9% of your gross from digital sales. Assuming the $0.60 per download is accurate, the breakeven point is 370 downloads: that is, you will have to sell more than 370 downloads to do better with TuneCore than with CD Baby. For a name like Public Enemy, that's a no-brainer. For other unsigned bands--depends on whether you tour, whether your MySpace friends actually translate into paying customers, and so on.
If you're signed with a label, they've probably already covered digital distribution for you, and the contract says what the contract says.
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