tunecore

The monarchy comes to Twitter, but of course the Queen doesn't sully her fingers on the keyboard, she has a royal twitterer do that. We also discuss whether the new Universal Music Group deal with TuneCore will change the landscape of music. We also absolve North Korea of the botnet.

Universal/TuneCore deal opens major doors for indie artists http://arstechnica.com/media/news/2009/07/universaltunecore-deal-opens-major-doors-for-indie-artists.ars http://news.cnet.com/8301-13526_3-10283224-27.html

Korean DDoS Bots To Self-Destruct http://it.slashdot.org/story/09/07/10/0452256/Korean-DDoS-Bots-To-Self-Destruct … Read more

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 … Read more

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.

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), … Read more

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).

With SoundScan, instead of relying on surveys from record stores, the labels could see exactly how … Read more

What should bands pay for? Can art and marketing coexist? Has the digital world made do-it-yourself recording, marketing, and distribution easier, or do musicians still need the old-fashioned triumvirate of booking agent, record label, and radio airplay to thrive?

If you're interested in such questions, and you're heading to the South by Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas, this year, check out a panel discussion in which I'll be participating called The Artist as Entrepreneur at 1:30 p.m Wednesday. Most of the people on the panel are in the business of helping musicians use the … Read more

Jango CEO Dan Kaufman posted a long response to my post criticizing Jango Artist Airplay as a pay-for-play scheme that artists should avoid. (He also e-mailed me with contact info, so I'm fairly sure it's him, although the usual caveats apply.) It's a thoughtful comment, and Dan comes across as a serious businessperson, not a fly-by-night scam artist.

To summarize, Jango is trying to maintain a quality experience for listeners by making sure they're not inundated with Airplay artists they're not going to like. Rather than playing Airplay artists based strictly on how much money … Read more

Last week, I blogged about digital distributor RouteNote and did a brief comparison with CD Baby and Tunecore, two better-known services that help independent artists place their songs in online music stores such as iTunes and Amazon MP3.

Now RouteNote has one-upped me on its own blog and run a detailed--and very helpful--mathematical comparison of itself versus CD Baby, Tunecore, The Orchard, and Musicadium.

You can check out a direct comparison of up-front charges and ongoing revenue splits, as well as a chart showing how much money the artist will earn after selling specific numbers of songs.

RouteNote acknowledges when … Read more

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.

But Audiolife's download store is … Read more

Just after it announced a distribution deal with high-profile social music service iLike, digital music distribution company TuneCore has another deal to announce: it's raised $7 million in venture funding from Opus Capital.

The company works like this: musicians upload their music, and TuneCore handles the distribution to digital outlets like iTunes, Amazon MP3, and Rhapsody. TuneCore does not take any cut of the royalties; it makes money from an up-front fee for uploading an album. The funding from Opus will be used for marketing and product development, including a streaming music player that TuneCore plans to launch within … Read more