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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
…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…
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 ]
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…
Over the last few years, I’ve been talking to clients and members about how to get a core group of your fans to fund your recording sessions by selling pre-order copies and letting folks purchase “executive producer” credits on discs.…
Tim Lee’s got an awesome post about eMusic and its lack of DRM. I’m used to folks’ jaws dropping when I tell them at seminars that they should not worry at all about people ripping off their albums. And, in…
Lefsetz has some choice language for record execs that don’t understand why there are still ten illegal downloads of a hit song for each paid download. And he wonders why nobody in the mainstream media’s writing/thinking about why this whole…
Thousands of artists use CD Baby’s digitial distribution program to get their music into iTunes, Rhapsody and other digital stores. Today, CD Baby posted a streamlined version of their DD agreement. Among the changes are: improved readability, ringtones and an…
Looks like Starbucks is moving closer to offering digital music downloads through their Hear Music program, allowing customers to load MP3s directly onto portable players, in addition to CD sales and on-the-spot CD burning: “A lot of our customers are…
That Robert Levine spends two pages talking about digital distribution without mentioning the runaway success of CDBaby boggles the mind. However, the article does frame up the interesting position that the Orchard has taken. Instead of focusing on the onesy-twosy…
NPD figured out that, when you equate 12 singles to one physical CD, iTunes now sells more music than Borders or Tower. See, we told you that record stores were becoming lousy places to try to sell records! iTMS Outsells…
They’re eager for folks to enjoy the record, and confident that audiences will support them at shows. [ link via Howard ] Track these topics:
Hey, orchestras can be indie artists, too! And the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra is launching its own e-label to distribute live recordings of its events. This is an innovative move, because the tight union contracts at most orchestras have made it…
Lefsetz has some insight into today’s Music Managers Forum conference in the UK — sounds like lots of whining with not much in the way of solutions. But he makes two great remarks that independent, working musicians should note: First,…
UK music manager Jazz Summers and the Music Managers Forum are sponsoring a mini-conference to spotlight the fact that artists still get a tiny percentage of the profits from digital downloads through iTunes and elsewhere. Commenters over at iPodNN rightly…
For folks who want to see how easily you can sell MP3s on your site, visit our friends Pale Beneath the Blue. Try out their system for 99 cents, and envision how you can plug something this simple into your…
Why would you want to raise the price of a product with the most extraordinary profit margin in the history of the music business? Jobs, rightly, thinks these folks are nuts. And, in other news, Steve Jobs pointed at the…
PayPal offers discounted transaction rates for sales under $2. What that means for you is that you can use a service like PayLoadz or ThirdSphere to deliver MP3s to your fans at iTunes prices, keeping as much as 89 cents…
Newbury Comics in the Northeast U.S. is testing out custom mix-CD technology, similar to what the folks at Starbucks are rolling out. I’ve been saying for some time (to paraphrase Dan Poynter) that record stores are pretty lousy places to…
Jeff Jarvis notes the AP report on the tripling of legal music downloads, and the industry spin that it’s because of anti-piracy campaigns… not at all because the folks at Apple and Y!Music have worked so hard to make it…
Steve Safran, who normally covers the news business for Lost Remote, has a fun extracurricular Q&A with Tracy Bonham about returning to indie labels after leaving Island Records, and all the inherent changes in marketing, touring, and getting paid.
Robin Good shares some key insights about multiple streams of income for musicians and other creatives.