As the digital music market grows, there are more and more players entering the digital distribution market, getting artists music onto iTunes, E-music, Amazon MP3, Rhapsody and the other big online stores. These aggregators represent a variety of different models, ranging from The Orchard’s more traditional ‘intensively involved’ regime, where they take a hand in promoting their artists through a home-grown press network, but help themselves to a large chunk of the back end (think around 35%) of all sales of their partners’ music, to Tunecore’s flat-rate model, where they take a $0.99 a song, $0.99 a store per album fee, plus a $9.99 – $19.98 annual fee per release. Our favourite of the available digital music distribution products is provided by RouteNote; instead of charging up front or subscription fees to artists who may never make the sales to cover the charges, or gouging large lumps out of the back end profits (they take 10%, which seems pretty modest next to the Orchard’s slice).
Currently their model works out to be the cheapest route to market for artists selling less than 20,000 units online (tracks) annually, which is pretty much everyone starting out in the industry, plus they have a few tools and guides to facilitate artist self promotion. They’re still reasonably small (their artist roster is just over 1,500 at the moment) but we’re looking for them to grow quickly over the coming months, particularly if they get a little more press.
Disclosure: This article was written by Dashiel Munding. Im currently CEO of RouteNote.
For the last two years we have been developing RouteNote at Insomnia Media, and in that time have been closely keeping an eye on digital music news and where the shift is going. I thought I would write a quick post and let everyone know my favourite digital music blogs to follow.
Hypebot – Hypebot is written by Bruce Houghton and is a daily report on the last news in the digital music space. Bruce is also the founder and president of Skyline Music (booking agency) and Skyline Consultancy in which he is a music and technology consultant to many music startups.
Digital Music News – Digital Music News is the news and information authority for music industry and technology executives. Digital Music News is founded and edited by Paul Resnikoff. Paul writes daily posts on Digital Music News and also send out a dialy newsletter to industry executives called the Daily Snapshot.
Billboard.biz – Billboard.biz is the digital music arm of the Billboard website. Billboard.biz discusses digital music news with normally at least 10 articles per day. Articles on Billboard.biz don’t just come straight from the USA they as encompass International digital music news, so that you get the full picture.
Digital Audio Insider – Digital Audio Insider is written by David Harrell, who writes digital music news from an artists perspective. David is in a band based in the UK and they use all kinds of different digital music stores and partners to sell/stream their music, and David’s writings are a great insight into what the average artist is thinking and what they are looking for.
Coolfer – Glenn Peoples has worked in the music industry for over eight years and founded Coolfer.com while working and living in New York City. Coolfer was a total ad free blog which is pretty unheard of these days. A week or so ago Glenn announced on his site that he would stop writing because he was offered a new job over at Billboard.biz asSenior Editorial Analyst, so you can now read his work over there.
Wired have decided to close Listening Post and Underwire. They are citing a great deal of overlap among Listening Post, Epicenter and Underwire so there is a wisdom to concentrating our fire where it will have the most impact.
Wired have thanks approximately 12 writers who have worked on the blog and it still hasnt been fully confirmed if they will be completely out of a job or not.
This seems to be a very strange move from Wired. It might have just been better to slowly move the Listening post material into another niche instead of just closing down the 40th most linked to blog in the world according to Technorati. I really do think it is a shame because I have been really loving the Listening Posts articles over the last year or so, and if the writers ever need somewhere to write please contact me, because we also have another blog over at RouteNote in which we are always on the look out for writers who can help musicians in the current climate.
