Folks have been talking to me a lot lately about “gamification.” It’s a popular business trend that hopes to leverage the video game habits of recent generations into stronger workplace productivity. Take a set of tasks that would otherwise sound…
Category
Selling MP3s
Three essential qualities of a successful indie record label
When I ran Handwritten Records in the 90s with my friend Kristen, indie labels still had a clear role in the music business. I was a production geek with access to a studio and a mass CD duplication machine, and…
Songcatch.com: the future of free MP3 search forces a strategy shift for music sales.
Artists sometimes ask me why I focus my books on earning revenue from touring and merchandise sales, instead of from boosting album sales. In response, let me introduce you to Arizona State University Economics and Finance major Hasan Siddiqui. The…
Nimbit uses venture capital to fund band-to-fan e-commerce platform
Techcrunch profiled Nimbit, a “band-to-fan” e-commerce platform that seems to roll up all the services from CDBaby, HostBaby, and Fanbridge into a single service. According to Rip Empson, the service has already rolled up $5 million in venture capital it…
Drexel’s Student-Run Record Label Reshaping Music Business Education
When I was in school — and I did have to walk uphill in the snow to get to class, so get off my lawn — the campus radio station was where you had to be if you wanted a…
Bum Rush the Charts Day
Via Bob, I learned about this interesting attempt to game the downloadable singles chart, the way that authors often do at Amazon.com. By coordinating a whole lot of purchases through iTunes, the organizers hope to land a podsafe single by…
The Orchard Teams with Last.fm
Independent media distributor The Orchard has teamed up with social music service Last.fm to make its catalog of over one million tracks available to the service’s users. If you haven’t used Last.fm, you should definitely check it out. While it’s…
Quit Yer iTunes Bellyaching
If I see anything else that tries to frame the front of the iTunes Store as a potential scandal, I’m gonna hurl. There’s nothing wrong with iTunes, as a content aggregator, choosing how to allocate its promotional inventory. Brick-and-mortar stores…
Listeners Use Your Music in Context — How You Can Spread Your Own Music Using iMixes
Listen to this great description of how one listener uses and enjoys iMix selections from the Apple iTunes Music Store. People in America used to use radio and mixtapes for that kind of experience, but now they turn to other…
It’s Easy to Sell a Million CDs
…and so very difficult to sell one thousand. Grant Robertson’s on fire over at the Digital Music Weblog, and he’s totally right about the pricing of online downloads. Fifteen years ago, if you had to get your hands on a…
Juliana Hatfield Lets Fans Run a Tab
She’s launching an honor system and requesting that, in exchange for the downloadable, DRM-free MP3s she’s posting to the site, that fans send in at least 50 cents for each copy they like/keep. [ via The Digital Music Weblog ]
What’s the Real Value of a Song? Free Downloads and Sponsored MP3s.
For years, I have written and lectured about how your songs (as downloadable MP3s) are your very best promotional vehicle. They contain value themselves, but making the process of getting them into your fans’ iPods and CD changers is where…