TuneCorner

The Advantages of Using Session Musicians on Your Songwriting Demo

Why do professional recordings sound, well…professional? There are a number of reasons including high quality microphones, pre-amps, an experienced engineer and a well-designed studio space. But one of the single most important elements in a great-sounding, professional recording is the performance of the session musicians. There is a reason that the job of the session musician exists. It’s these musicians whose talent and studio experience contribute in a major way to the polished sound of a recording. Because there are different rules that apply when you’re recording an artist demo, I'm going to limit the scope of this article to songwriting demos specifically.

What Every Musician Should Know About Digital Distribution, Part III

Part III: The Myth of Marketing and Promotion

Aggregators take a percentage of your earnings, forever, with no ceiling—why? Because they can, but it’s hardly good public relations to say so. They control the only path a small label or band can take to reach the big digital retailers like iTunes, so they can set up any terms they want. In Part II, I showed why distributors might have been entitled to a limitless cut in the past, when physical product had to be placed into brick-and-mortar stores, with all the risk and overhead and managing required. But in the digital world, it’s almost indefensible. A new reason has to be claimed for taking a percentage: marketing and promotion.

Trending Is Live, Plus New Store: ShockHound.com!

We're LIVE with Trending data! If you had sales from iTunes in the last week (Monday through Sunday, May 26 through June 1, 2008), and iTunes reported it, log in and click "My Account" and you can download the week's report for only $2.98 and see what sold, how many, by song and/or album, by artist, and also see the COUNTRY, STATE and CITY and ZIP CODE of where it sold!!

We're going to be adding back weeks (and of course forward weeks) over time.

Enjoy this new data, it's revolutionary!

Also, new store! TuneCore now delivers to ShockHound.com, the soon-to-be-launched Hot Topic store and community service and sharing site.

Thanks everyone! Major announcement by email coming soon.

--Peter and the whole TuneCore Team

What Every Musician Should Know About Digital Distribution, Part II

Here's the second installment of my article. Enjoy!
--Peter

Part II: What to Look For in a Digital Distributor

If you want your music up for sale in iTunes, Rhapsody, Napster, AmazonMP3, eMusic, Amie Street, Zune, BestBuy.com or any of the stores that have emerged as “big guns,” you either have to build a direct relationship with each one of them, or go with a digital distributor. Most people can’t do it on their own: as I wrote in Part I, stores simply won’t set up a deal with you, as a matter of policy, unless you’re big enough (around 200 releases or with some top-tier material already proven to generate considerable revenue, so as to attract the stores’ attentions). If you’re that big, you have your own legal staff, have been in this business a while and probably don’t need any advice from me.

So if you are a small label or individual artist, you’re going to have to go with a digital distributor. How do you pick one?

Apple changes the rules again.....

Very soon we are due to launch a new feature for TuneCore customers. If you sold music in iTunes you will be able to log in and see weekly trending sales data showing how many songs and/or albums sold the previous Monday – Sunday, the zip code/postal code, country and city of the buyer. In addition you also see the date of the sale and the projected money you have earned.

Apple has released this data to TuneCore and we built the system to ingest it and split it up between everyone’s account.

I wrote a press release about this and sent it to our publicist. They wanted to see if we could get some big press out of it by offering it as an exclusive to a news source. Good idea. The news source gets the exclusive (meaning they get to write about it before anyone else does) and in return they commit to running a feature story. After the first two outlets passed on picking up the story, a third one showed interest and asked this simple follow up question.

“So itunes doesnt offer this type of report to artists directly?”

My answer (kept very bullet point and staccato as it was a factual press inquiry) was:

“To have access to this info you have to be in a direct deal with iTunes

iTunes does do not do direct deals with most artists. The artists need to go via middlemen (the aggregator)

Most aggregators do not do deals with most artists, they filter whom they choose to work with by varying degrees. Most aggregators try to do deals with labels.

The aggregator has access to the Apple data, but in addition to access, it needs to build the technology to ingest the reports and then the tech to splinter it out to the different labels in a deal with the aggregator.

The labels would then need to build the same system - ingest these daily files, splinter them out by artist, title, song etc and then create the technology to deliver these files to the artists outside of the royalty accounting periods.

Labels account to bands either quarterly or bi-annually - usually 30 to 90 days after the end of each quarter or bi-annual period. Labels do not provide this level of detail to a band (take it from a guy that ran one for 20 years)

So the short answer is no, artists have NEVER had access to this information before - Apple is the FIRST retailer on the planet (as far as I know) to release the zip codes/postal codes of its buyers to the supplier.

And TuneCore is the first "supplier" to hand this information to the artist”

I clicked send and about two minutes later realized the magnitude and importance of this.

For the first time a “retailer” (Apple) is allowing people to know extremely detailed information about its customers, down to the zip codes of its buyers.

This would be the same thing as Tower Records supplying the Zip Code of each buyer of CDs at Tower to the record labels.

It just did not (and does not) happen. This information is usually very highly guarded by the retailer (not to mention very hard to collect). And Apple released it. Kudos to them!

Because the release of this data is so new and no one has ever released this it before, there really weren’t pre-existing systems set up to ingest it all. And even with these systems built, there was still a barrier between the company that received the information and handing it out to the musicians.

In other words, record labels just do not send daily or weekly information at this level of detail to the actual artist. Sure, there is something called Soundscan, a third party company which trys to provide this data, but it is not 100% accurate nor does it have this level of detail. And although anyone can buy this information from Soundscan, the price is quite high (thousands of dollars for access to it). However, Soundscan does compile all the sales information from all the stores into one report. The reports in TuneCore are only from Apple.

That being said Apple is the number one seller of music in the US (if not the world).

Now, for the very first time, musicians can have very detailed information about who their fans are, where they live, what songs are being bought, how often, what country, how much money they have coming to them when the accounting statement shows up the following month and more from the largest seller of music on the planet.

With this information, musicians have the ability to plan a tour to where their buying fan are as well as promote themselves to local radio, TV, newspapers with hard proof that they should be covered. In addition, for TuneCore users, artist have a pretty good idea of how much money is coming down the pipeline and when.

Planning out cash flow, buying things, tour support issues all become a lot easier.

The most interesting thing to me is, the entities that control this data do not release it as many are concerned it could hurt them if they let it out, seems to me, it just makes things more robust and healthier. With more information, there is more reason to pursue your passion which can only be better for us all.