Amazon & TuneCore To Cut Out the RIAA Middleman 291
eldavojohn writes "So you're an aspiring band and you haven't signed with a record label. Maybe you've got a fan base interested in purchasing your stuff but you're not really into accounting? Enter Amazon's partnership with TuneCore, a CD printing and music distribution service. You want to sell a full album on Amazon of you brushing your teeth? $31. And you get about 40% back on sales, so selling nine digital copies of your CD will put you back in the black. There you have it, public availability on one of the largest online commerce sites for $31 — no RIAA involved!" TuneCore's CEO put it this way: "As an artist, you have unlimited physical inventory, made on demand, with no [sic] upfront costs and worldwide distribution to anyone who orders it at Amazon.com."
Print on demand... (Score:2, Insightful)
I know several up-and-coming musicians, and putting out their first couple of CDs is always a financial adventure. If these guys can produce professional-looking packaging on a one-off basis, it could be just what struggling musicians need!
The fact that it shows how irrelevant the big labels are becoming is just icing on the cake.
Could this do it? (Score:5, Insightful)
I could legitimately see this as being the beginning of the end for the RIAA, and I've never thought that before. It makes sense that it would take a big media vendor with a well-established user community, combining manufacturing with sales.
This would be fantastic if I were a musician. No inventory. No worrying about manufacturnig. And you get a percentage of revenue that you won't see anywhere else. The general Amazon community will make marketing a *lot* easier than it would be otherwise. All in all, it seems to make the RIAA meaningless. I really think indie bands might be able to make this work. I'm looking forward to shopping for music on this and know the RIAA ain't getting a dime.
Re:$31 for pressed CDs? (Score:2, Insightful)
massive read the freaking article before posting FAIL on your part, dude.
kthxbai
Re:At $31 per album (Score:5, Insightful)
It was my understanding that the band paid $31 as sort of a "starting fee". After that initial $31, there is nothing more to pay (that is, if I understood what I read correctly). They're not trying to -sell- the discs for $31 a pop.
You're close, it's $31 a year. Which is why there's no "upfront costs" as the quote says at the bottom of the summary but instead a $31/year. Which is still really really cheap. Interestingly enough, Wired uses "upfront" costs to describe it, from the article:
Tunecore will charge just $31 a year in upfront fees to handle a 10-track CD from pressing to delivery, passing all other costs through to the buyer. In other words, the service promises to remove nearly all of the risks of short-run CD manufacturing, which can cost musicians hundreds or even thousands of dollars for discs that rarely sell enough to cover expenses.
I think people are missing the big picture where you don't have to go to multiple services for your music. You'll be able to buy big names like U2 and Weezer right next to little high school rock bands and indie artists. You make that possible so that the people don't know whether they're buying RIAA or not and who knows? Maybe the musician will decide the RIAA route is not really worth it?
Marketing? (Score:1, Insightful)
I dont like the record labels but people do seem to forget they do some work of value - like marketing.
I put my bands album out on this website and how is anyone going to know its there?
Sure a couple of bands make it from word of mouth and internet activity, youtube etc but the vast majority dont.
Give me a big marketing budget and some pluggers any day.
Re:Could this do it? (Score:2, Insightful)
and no marketing......
It would be nice if this helps break the RIAA, but I think it unlikely. All this really does is create the ability to cheaply distribute CDs which are a dying medium. Artists already have the ability to self distribute digital copies. So what is the big deal ?
Producing a quality product that meets a real need at a price that people are willing to pay is only about 30% of success. The other 70% is marketing.
This service does nothing to help with marketing so there will be a million artists that no one has ever heard of or will listen to. Word of mouth marketing is (a) slow and (b) statistically unlikely to succeed. "Word of mouth successes" are really driven by people who are good at self promotion which most people are not. Plus for every successful "word of mouth" story that someone can point to, there are thousands of failures.
Not an RIAA killer, not even close
Re:At $31 per album (Score:5, Insightful)
...as opposed to getting about 50 cents to a dollar on each CD, and that's if you're lucky to be Madonna or someone already famous...
I'd say it's a very good deal.
one obvious drawback to this model is that you canÃ(TM)t sell an on-demand CD at shows, where enthusiastic fans are most likely to pick one up.
I don't think there would be anyone stopping the band from buying the CDs from Amazon for $9 and selling them at the concert for $15, with an autograph and some booklet, or for something like $25-50 with a signed t-shirt and booklet.
They'd only lose about 5$ on each CD, but in the end it may still be better than ordering and paying in advance for a 500-1000 batch of discs at a duplication factory.
Hey RIAA (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't bite the hand that feeds you. Goodbye.
Re:CDBaby (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem with their model is that 35 of those newest 40 are recycled from that 10,000,000.
Re:Marketing? (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure a couple of bands make it from word of mouth and internet activity, youtube etc but the vast majority dont.
Give me a big marketing budget and some pluggers any day.
(a) Even given the "big marketing budget and some pluggers", the vast majority of bands don't make it anyway....
(b) Given the typical RIAA-member contract, you're probably clearing more money from the Amazon/Tunecore arrangement, and you haven't mortgaged your souls for a decade in the process.
Re:It's missing some elements (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sorry, but unless you want to be the next Hoobastank or some such nonsense, those things are completely unnecessary.
If you want to actually sell enough CDs (or novels, or software, or greetings cards, or whatever) to make anything like a living, you need marketing.
If you write the Great American Novel, put it up on Lulu, and wait for the income to roll in, you'll sell 20 copies if you're lucky. To do better you've got to send review copies to magazines and web sites, persuade them you're worth interviewing for an article, get some viral marketing going for your product etc.
The same would go for a CD, even if you're not going for the mainstream. Get a reputation for live shows. Get written about in the specialist press. Get played on specialist radio shows or net radio. Get blogged about.
The OP's right. Traditional record labels do all this stuff, and that's part of where the money goes.
Still, it's all stuff you can DIY, or have done separately.
Re:Print on demand... (Score:3, Insightful)
You may not include: email addresses, URLs
Thanks for quoting that. Can't contain URLs, WTF? You can't promote your band's website on your own album? That's pretty messed up.
Re:$31 for pressed CDs? (Score:2, Insightful)
Uuh.. you know it's 2009, right ? You can whip out your iPhone, start up iTunes and buy and download the album right there, on the spot. You don't even have to wait in line at the stall that sells the CD's.
Re:CDBaby (Score:5, Insightful)
No one that knows about this service would sign unless they already have major sales...
Unfortunately this still doesn't provide a good alternative to one important service the major record labels provide: promotion.
Just because you put your independent band up on MySpace and SonicBids and your own website and sell your songs on iTunes and your CD on CDBaby doesn't magically make everyone in the world suddenly know you exist and want to buy your stuff. Somehow they still have to stumble across you in the first place, out of the trillions of other bands who have done the same as you.
This Amazon service is awesome, and it's part of a much larger trend that will ultimately make the major labels obsolete, but there's still more work to be done.
Re:CDBaby (Score:3, Insightful)
No one that knows about this service would sign unless they already have major sales
I don't think that's true. People want more than to break even on the cost of a CD, they want fame and success. If you want your song played on the radio or a music video on MTV, you still need to go through a major label.
I'm not saying this is a good thing. It's a pretty strong financial argument against the labels, but some people want to be famous, too.
Re:Could this do it? (Score:4, Insightful)
Artists already have the ability to self distribute digital copies. So what is the big deal ?
I think it is a big deal for marketing to have a central platform - nobody would look up an artist's site and key in credit card info etc... unless they know and like the band already. An Amazon "indie" bestseller list, and a centralized storefront gives far more exposure to artists with far less work involved. (Just think of the software equivalent: selling on the iPhone appstore vs. a trying to sell the equivalent application for an equally popular Nokia phone from your own website...)
As for the marketing bit - the RIAA sponsored artists are also _statistically_ unlikely to succeed unless they are one of the handful that get picked for payola and million-dollar ad budgets... This just makes the non-top-100 album, which was previously pretty much a loss-making proposition for RIAA artists, a viable avenue. And if you look away from M-TV and ClearChannel, there are oodles of niche magazines and subculture sites which could easily push an unknown artist to 2,000 sales - previously not worth the effort, now generating a year's salary.
Re:What's misspelled? (Score:4, Insightful)
Generally speaking, you're right, but there's no reason "sic" can't be used in that fashion. Use of "sic" is meant simply to draw the reader's attention to something that the author wrote, and the editor knows is wrong, but doesn't feel justified in correcting. I would think that factual errors are at least as likely to fall into this category as typographical errors, which should just be corrected without comment by the editor, in most cases.
Re:Could this do it? (Score:4, Insightful)
Artists already have the ability to self distribute digital copies. So what is the big deal ?
Amazon. Now it's being sold through a site (Amazon) that people actually go to, as opposed to some no-name. Another difference is that Amazon has the money to possibly decide "You know what? We want to become the new music cartel, which we will do by actually treating musicians well." If bands get the idea that Amazon could actually market them, that might be more attractive than a label contract. What bands have to do is decide that long-term freedom and profitability are better than the lure of the advance they'll get from the label.
You're probably right that the CD itself is less important than the distribution, but if this works I expect they'll figure that out.
We'll see how it plays out, but if they start using their massive data mining capabilities to sell new bands to people the same way they sell new books...seriously, this could get interesting.
Re:At $31 per album (Score:2, Insightful)
Unless there's some evil clause in the contract prohibiting reselling, it seems like it would work.
Re:CDBaby (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately this still doesn't provide a good alternative to one important service the major record labels provide: promotion.
Well, this is the essence of what the future of the Record industry is, isn't it? You have two distinct businesses that are finally getting separated. On the one hand, you have the music sales group which makes money based on sales of the actual music. On the other, you have a marketing/promotion group which makes money off of concerts and the like. The former is a dead business model that'll go away with services like the one mentioned in this story. The latter is something that an agent or a marketing company or a PR firm can do. Really, this is what a record company will eventually evolve to.
Re:No URLs or contact info allowed on artwork?! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:CDBaby (Score:3, Insightful)
It's called getting off your ass.
Send CD's to radio stations to get air play. Get out and PLAY at better venues. The Intersection in Grand Rapids is a little crap hole bar that a lot of indies got their leap into fame from.
Get out, play for people, get Cd's in the hands of people that will play it on the air.
If you think as a "band" you can sit back and wait for it to happen, you smoked way too much dope.
Re:At $31 per album (Score:5, Insightful)
I think people are missing the big picture where you don't have to go to multiple services for your music.
Not only does this put indie bands next to U2, but it even opens the doors for a whole new level of artist "below" the indie artist, because you no longer have to drop a couple grand to press a thousand CDs.
Currently, if you want to sell a professionally made CD (ie. not a CD-R), you pretty much have to order at least 1000 of them. But what about bands who know they're not going to sell that many? Sure, CDBaby will take as few as 5 discs into their inventory if that's all you think you're going to sell, but what do you do with the other 995 you had to manufacture in order to be able to manufacture any at all?
With this service, if 5 is all you're going to sell, then 5 is all that will be produced, and the total cost to you is only $31 -- which, to most artists, is worth it even if they don't make that money back in sales.
Re:CDBaby (Score:5, Insightful)
Send CD's to radio stations to get air play.
Most stations won't even open the package. College stations might, but mainstream ones aren't interested.
Get out and PLAY at better venues.
That works locally, but what about the rest of the world?
Get out, play for people, get Cd's in the hands of people that will play it on the air.
I'm not saying that it can't be done, and I certainly don't advocate bands sitting on their asses and expecting to become instant multi-millionaires because they recorded an album. But marketing music is hard, especially in a world that has as many bands as this one has. It takes a lot of effort to stand out and get noticed, and you have to recognize that just because you may be good at writing and playing songs doesn't mean you're magically good at marketing those songs. Most bands need someone with knowledge and experience to handle that for them.
Re:No URLs or contact info allowed on artwork?! (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, that's an iTunes restriction that tunecore are passing on, and it only applies to the front cover artwork of the album.
Re:CDBaby (Score:3, Insightful)
It's called gigging.
You play to an audience. Dish out some flyers. A few of them like you and check your web site or add you as a friend on MySpace/Facebook. Their friends might check you out too.
You even get paid for the gig.
Re:The 90s called! They want their CDs back! (Score:3, Insightful)
This was my initial reaction also, at least about buying discs. I quit buying cds a while ago. But then I realized I still buy books - and people are always asking me why.
It's a matter of personal preference and obviously there are still a number of people who want to buy discs. I don't get it - but more power to them.
Then finally, one can't ignore the Amazon part of the equation. Just being visible there could mean a huge boost in visibility for a band and more visitors to sites like the one you envision.
Re:CDBaby (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The 90s called! They want their CDs back! (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't get the point of pressing a CD. Who has a CD player anyways nowadays? I mean, I can buy a in-car-stereo with a USB connector for 100! It home, most people have their computers hooked to some amplifier or active speakers anyways. And I don't know if anyone even owns a portable CD player anymore.
uhm, i think you miss the point.. and lots of people still like albums..
sure, us techies have all the gadgets and gizmos... but cars still come with CD players, people still like flipping through physical albums, people still like cover art and people still like to play CD's... sure they are going the way of the dodo.. but its easier to sell something tangible, rather than just a mp3 file..
i know plenty of indie musicians who press CD's so they can sell them after a show, or order from their website,.. its more about makin that money, and getting the tanglible item out there... the CD's get passed along, people see them in the CD rack and ask about them, etc.. its important, very important.. and always well be... whether is a CD, a laser disc, a cassette tape, and 8 track or a 33...
how often do i look through someones CD collection at a party.... all the time... how often do I boot their computer and snoop through their files... rarely...
plus its in the interest of indie bands to sell a CD to a fan... "you like that song? cool... its on this CD on amazon, buy it, support is"... in turn the musician gets some pay, and the fan gets introduced to more of the music... rinse and repeat..
The business model of big music worked really well, and continues to work... this gives more control and money to the artist, and more money to amazon... works for me, i'll definately be talking to my friends about exploring this avenue of exposure..
Re:CDBaby (Score:4, Insightful)
So maybe you aren't an instant star. Big Fucking Deal.
Do you think that the guy [jonathancoulton.com] behind Portal's Still Alive song was picked for that honor because the Valve devs heard him on the radio?
Do you think the reason someone [frontalot.com] gets invited to PAX every year is because he's got an agent behind him doling out the payola to Tycho and Gabe?
No, you can't find their CD's browsing Best Buy or Wal-Mart. But I bet you they still make enough on their work that they can afford dinner at the end of the day.
Re:The 90s called! They want their CDs back! (Score:3, Insightful)
1. Downloading and copying original CD's is still considered "illegal" by a large group of people even though it isn't if you paid for it.
2. A lot of people actually like something tangible they can use in their car or they can rip to MP3's themselves.
3. Loss of digital media is still a big problem and easier to do in much more ways than a tangible object (it's more likely to have your disk crash than your house burn down and the hard drive doesn't have insurance).
4. The current digital solutions are still largely unknown and together with DRM they have more headaches than anything. You have to remember to backup your media collection regularly, it takes up space on your hard drive and if you need reinstalling or a new computer, it all disappears. If the vendor put DRM on it and the vendor disappears (even temporarily eg. when their servers are down) the music stops working. It's too bad but that's the way it is.
Re:CDBaby (Score:2, Insightful)
Send your CD to the throngs of Music podcasts and blogs. They will listen and if it's not junk they talk about it. There is a HUGE group of people that listen to Indifeed podcast.
Embrace the marketing system that the RIAA ignores. On the Endcap of Walmart is not where you want to be. Being on the endcap there means you are getting $0.06 per disc sold... No thanks.
Honestly this stuff is not that hard, Stop trying to think the way the RIAA and labels WANT YOU to think.
P.S. It's easy to get past the radio station mail guards. You gotta learn Guerrilla Marketing.
Re:It's missing some elements (Score:3, Insightful)
Very successful artists have long, successful, comfortable careers.
FTFY.
The vast majority of artists don't have comfortable careers. Or careers in the art at all. There simply isn't enough money going to artists to make that possible.
Re:CDBaby (Score:3, Insightful)
I think you're assuming that the majority of consumers care whether a given musician is considered art, or are even capable of telling the difference.
Artists make art that they think is good. Fame/Success/Money-seekers make a product that will satisfy the desires of a large number of people. Do you really think good art will ever replace commercial art? Good art by its very nature challenges people, and most people don't want to be challenged. They want to go out and dance and party and get laid. And that is, not surprisingly, what most of the Top 40 are about.
I would argue that people will be upset if pointless, fun, mind-numbing, easy to listen to music dies in favor serious, artistic music. But we won't ever find out, because the market will always favor what's popular over what's good. If the labels die, the populist musicians will rise to prominence through a different venue and the true artists will still only be listened to by that small segment of the population that cares about artistic music.
Must pull fangs first (Score:4, Insightful)
The latter is something that an agent or a marketing company or a PR firm can do. Really, this is what a record company will eventually evolve to.
I agree, your post is spot-on.
The first thing that has to happen though is to get the record companies to not be so damn dangerous. Pull their fangs.
They killed internet radio [usatoday.com] because of ideas like this, you know. They still have enough power to get insane laws like this one [dailykos.com] passed (you actually have to pay the RIAA to broadcast your own unlicensed non-RIAA member music if you can imagine that!) And they'll do anything they can to remain relevant.
Free money and piles of it - who wouldn't fight for that?
So good job Amazon (never thought I'd say that) and keep chipping away at these jerks. Eventually they'll go the way of the dodo.
Re:Sad state of artists contracts... (Score:3, Insightful)
It's 40% of turnover, not of profit.
Once you consider the manufacturing and distribution costs it doesn't look so bad. Compare it with CD Baby, who are an independent distributor, they take $4 per CD for warehousing and distribution, and you supply them with CDs which will cost you about $1 a pop to make in 'small band' quantities. You'll make a tiny bit more profit that way, but there is an up-front investment and the strong possibility of not breaking even to worry about.
Re:Could this do it? (Score:3, Insightful)
Tell that to mall retailers who are employing out of work (laid off) skilled IT people. Tell that to (legal) immigrants with no marketable skills. Tell that to people who dropped out of high school/did not go to college/dropped out of college. People age 18-25 need to eat too. Preferably without working 2+ jobs without health insurance because their employer won't schedule them for more than 39 hours a week to avoid it.
Re:No URLs or contact info allowed on artwork?! (Score:3, Insightful)
You can't promote your band's website on your band's CD?
You can't promote your band's website on the front cover. Think about it: Does iTunes want you to use them as a means of spreading the word about your band to the masses, only to have the album cover image on iTunes direct iTunes shoppers to the band's website where they can buy it for cheaper through something like Nimbus? Not likely.
Go ahead and put whatever you want inside the CD jacket, though. Who the hell wants their URL on the cover anyway?