TuneCorner

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

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.

The TuneCore Huffington Post Article

This posting went live at the Huffington Post some time ago - I thought it made sense to make it available here as well.

The Democratization of the Music Industry

(The original posting can be found here.)

Due to the advent and adoption of the Internet, digital media and hardware by the masses, control of the global music industry has being broken. For the first time, all music creators can choose to be their own record label – there are no longer subjective gatekeepers controlling who gets let “in”, promoted, exposed and made available to the masses, the choice now becomes ours.

For the past century, artists could record, manufacture, market, and, to some degree, promote their own music, but no matter if they were The Beatles, Elvis or Led Zepplin, they could not distribute it and get in placed on the shelves of the stores across the country, the required costs and infrastructure of the physical world were just too massive – a 500,00 square foot warehouse staffed with 30 people,  trucks and inventory systems, insurance, a field staff of 30 people walking to music stores leveraging, begging, pleading and paying to get the CD, album, 8-track, wax spool etc on the precious shelves of the retail stores.

Musical Freedom = Musical Responsibility

"Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it." ~George Bernard Shaw

As a musician, entrepreneur, and consultant, I've spent a lot of time thinking about how to create a new "path" for musicians to succeed.

Unlike the olden days, success doesn't have to equate with record sales, or even concert attendance.

Why? The emerging music industry is flexible. There aren't any make-or-break "gatekeepers." It's wide open and the costs are pretty much zero. There are no barriers to expression. Make a song for your mom and email it to her. Or take over the British singles charts. Whatever. Make what you want of it.

The key word, however, is "you". Even more than usual, musicians are the ones who will be ultimately responsible for music's progress.

TuneCore Tech Corner

Hi there! Thanks to all the artists and musicians who are making TC such a great place to work. We spend a lot of time down here in the engine room making sure things run smoothly. Here's a few hints about how you can make sure your album goes up as fast as possible.

Upload WAV or FLAC files of your music whenever you can: it's easier for us to process the files. Since every store demands different audio formats (some need MP3s, some need M4As, others need Windows Media, still others take WAV files), we translate your music to all those formats and want to start with the highest possible quality input to ensure quality output. This is even more important when the store sells lower-bitrate audio files--the higher the quality going in, the better it sounds under compression. We'll still take a compressed audio file (such as an MP3), but it won't sound quite as good on the other end. We do everything we can to ensure your music files meet all audio quality standard, so help us out by sending the best you have.

At TuneCore, the back-end servers (about 100 virtual servers running on Amazon's EC2 service) do all the audio "heavy lifting." We spent the last year or so building a system powerful enough to process hundreds of times as many albums as we could before. You may notice your new albums are getting through the system faster and getting onto iTunes even more quickly. We've improved our error rates and processing times radically since last year, and we're constantly striving for perfection. There's a lot more cool features in the pipeline for the next few months, starting with those band pages. On behalf of Marcus, Mike, Alex and the rest of the TC dev team, thanks for using TuneCore!

Food for Thought: I'll Have the Apple Pie

Steve Jobs just posted this essay in his Apple blog:

http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughtsonmusic/

It makes for interesting reading. In essence, Jobs says, "If you big music companies stop making us use DRM, we'll stop requiring it." The numbers Jobs uses does make the whole DRM-for-iPods thing sound academic, against the massive exchange of music that bypasses DRM altogether. That makes we consumers hope there'll be a mass throwings-in of towels and the end of DRM altogether.

What Jobs doesn't mention is how this might affect iPod sales. By not mentioning it, he implies he doesn't really consider it a problem--which further implies his confidence that iPod sales won't be affected because people buy them not to comply with DRM on already-purchased (or to-be-purchased-through-iTunes) music, but rather on the sheer merits of the iPod, and presumably future iPods and iPhones.

That's refreshing! I like the idea that Jobs values competition and, staring it in the teeth, has no fear of losing market share even in the face of losing a few shreds of market protection. This is the crux of the argument, of course: DRM even now is just a shred of armor, barely matters to even 3% of what's out there digitally. So in a sense, Jobs can look at the iPod market domination and say, "Hey, we already won, it's practically a free market anyway, and the iPod rules!"

In that way, Jobs is stating he has nothing to lose: he can side with the NO DRM crowd (related to the "all music should be free" crowd, they're cousins), thereby making Apple look neutral in the debate. And in this debate there is no neutrality, so it shifts the burden of DRM squarely onto the big record companies.

I suspect a stance like that will sell more iPods.

--Peter

Form and Analysis

In high school, I studied piano and music theory. I remember building four-part harmonies and counterpoint, learning the rules of chord progression, the scales, even a bit of twelve-tone theory for spice.

When  I look at a site like Pandora, I'm a little awed. The Music Genome Project has created this site and is populating it with music profiles, "DNA"s of music. Their people sit around categorizing music not by traditional "form and analysis," but other, less academic methods. These are invisible, transparent to the end user, but you get a "profile" and they match music to your tastes.

I think the old traditional way of analyzing music formed a method, a vocabulary whereby those educated in it could find the music they liked, or, in the language they used a hundred years ago, the music that was "eternal" or "great" or "timeless." These new systems democratize, reach not for common denominators of greatness, but for an infinitely versatile sliding scale that codifies and uses your own tastes in the service of exposing...and marketing, of course.

I'm of mixed minds about it. After all, they don't teach you how to use or apply the scale themselves, they don't educate. You click a button and they provide "music you might like" based on their algorithms, their black-box analysis of the music in your own iTunes library or on your hard drive. They'll only suggest music in their own catalogs, of course, which is a marketeer's delight, and that also worries me. This tool can be used for evil--coopting the Internet's astounding heterodoxy with normalizing traits: it doesn't matter what you like, SOMETHING mainstream in our catalog will match your "profile" close enough, you should listen to this, then buy it from us. This is already happening on Pandora--you can only skip (read "browse") a few titles, then you're stuck listening to what they gave you. Hmm.

But the Internet routes around even these sorts of things, because you can't put a lid on the idea. Other sites with other algorithms will pop up, ones which match in different ways. I expect there'll eventually be "meta-recommendation" sites that rate and explore the idiosyncrasies of the profiling sites, or that places like Digg.com will serve as watchdogs.

In all, though, it's part of how market forces collide with Internet possibilities to generate low-level AIs, and that fascinates me to no end. What does it mean that a computer, through non-aesthetic analysis (after all, a computer can't LIKE a piece of music) nevertheless uses trend-analyzing algorithms to refine what I like, whether I know I'll like it or not?

If it doesn't work, of course, I can always fall back on the old-fashioned method. Because, see, I love choral music in minor keys that ends with plagel cadences.

--Peter

On the Road

Two of us are heading to Chicago for RailsConf, the computer programming conference of the century! Well, okay, maybe just the year. It should be fun.

We leave by car from Massachusetts Wednesday morning and get back at nearly the end of June. It's quite a road trip, covering more than 2000 miles there and back, with assorted side trips.

All this while continuing to answer customer support emails, running the site and working practically as usual. We'll be putting in a couple of hours every night at the hotels we're in, wherever they are.

So if we're a LITTLE slower in answering your emails, forgive us, we're on the road. We'll still answer everything within 24 hours, just not within 24 minutes the way I prefer it.

But we leave with a major breakthrough--the April earnings are IN, and separate store billing is LIVE (that is, people who have albums in the system can now add other stores at will). Took a lot of programming to make that happen, but we did it before the start of our trip. Whew.

Take care, and stay tuned for updates from the road, if anything interesting happens.

--Peter and Gary

My Accounts

A lot of folks have been wondering what's up with the My Accounts pages.  We are busily finishing up a few last minute things - but on the 18th, if all goes well, you should be able to log in and view the sales data for your albums, and withdraw money via Paypal or paper check.

Thanks for your patience everyone!

Using technology to validate

In thinking today about the goals of TuneCore, I am reminded of the work of Thomas Friedman.  Friedman wrote the book The Lexus and the Olive Tree, which, to my mind, is one of the more sensible examinations of the effects of globalization.  Friedman states that globalization is the direct outcome of the democratization of technology, finance, and information.  Globalization is both the cause and effect of free markets and, thus, innovation…the Lexus.  However, Friedman also confronts the other driving issue of our planet: identity.  Identity (cultural or otherwise) potentially runs directly afoul of globalization.  Globalization, therefore, if not managed with caution, will destroy the unique identities and cultures—our individual and collective roots—that are represented by the Olive Tree.

How does this relate to TuneCore?  Well, one of the points Friedman makes is that because of the advances in technology, “today we can all be producers.”  And while he doesn’t specifically talk about music, it is implicit.  One of the principle goals of TuneCore is to leverage technology to validate production through making your music widely available.

What is truly exciting to me, however, is that because this technology is being leveraged to help creators of art, we are necessarily balancing the Lexus and Olive Tree dialectic.  Identity/validation, for artists is, of course, everything.  And by facilitating the distribution of the creator, TuneCore is in fact empowering the creators of culture.  We are in a sense providing the fecund soil for that Olive Tree of creative identity to take root.   

To unite technology and identity (the Lexus and the Olive Tree) in a manner that is complimentary seems to me to be a virtuous way to proceed.

A Bug Overcome

Thank heavens that's over.

A bug that delayed hundreds of albums and set us back has been overcome. We lost time, but we're fast making it up.

Every image was failing, all those album covers growing to hundreds of megs in size, clogging the system: all because we didn't have the newest patched version of an imaging software we use. It's always the little bonehead things that cause the problems.

Albums are now streaming to iTunes and Rhapsody nice and fast, and they're all doing great. Maybe now we can get some sleep.

The new My Account page mockup is in place, so people can see what their My Account pages will look like--sort of. We haven't set the final form of the pages, so the mockup is a "reasonable approximation." It shouldn't matter, as the My Account pages themselves should be live darn soon.

It's all coming together. It's exhausting, but very exciting!

--Peter

Intro

Hey there.  Gary here, head of technology for Tunecore.  I have to say, the past few months have been some of the most hectic of my life, getting the site off the ground and into the air.  And there's a ton more to do.  I'll be posting here with periodic updates and answers to questions that people send in.  We are a small development team with a tight schedule and trying real hard to build a reliable site that does what you, the Tunecore user, wants.  I'm a big fan of user-centered design so if you have any questions or suggestions feel free to email me at gary@tunecore.com!  I try to answer everything I get.

So watch this space for future updates from the land of Tunecore's technology.

Subtle Change for Adding Albums

Subtle change today, but an important one.

Until now, the iTunes U.S. store was always included, you had to take it. Your albums would always be delivered to the iTunes U.S. store. Therefore we offered it at no extra charge.

Now you can choose any store! Whatever you choose first is included at no extra charge. It's a small change, but a really important one. What if you don't have rights to distribute your music in America? What if you don't want to sell your music in the U.S.? Our customers no longer have to appear in iTunes U.S., and they still get one free store, this time of their choice. Additional stores are still $0.99, as always. Little things like this help us become a more global player, give choice to our clients and will improve customer service.

I think I caught all the places in our documentation that say "iTunes U.S. always included, always free"--I sure hope I did. If you spot one, let me know.

Thanks for being eagle-eyed, more news soon!

--Peter

Getting Lost in iTunes

I heard all this hype about the TV show Lost. I could have cared less. Then, as a holiday present, my friend Steph sent me season one on DVD . One night I watched episode one and got hooked. Damn Steph, like I have any free time in my life. Now I have to figure out how to get home on Wed nights to see the thing ( no, I don't have a TIVO).

Then alongs comes iTunes making the shows available to buy for $1.99 the day after they broadcast. I am never home when it airs - still working. But this iTunes thing is very cool. I buy it, pay the $1.99, download it in about 10 to 20 minutes, plug my Powerbook audio into the stereo ( no, I am not cool enough to get the wireless system to broadcast to my stereo from my Mac) and watch.

Now they have a "Season Pass" where for around $12 you can get every episode that has aired and all future episodes of the show.

Man I like it when technology actually works the way its supposed to. You just know the Mac minis are really built to be media centers hooked into your TV and stereo. Download your TV shows, play them on your TV all via your Mac Mini with its remote control.

And - for what it is worth - this last episode of Lost about Hurley, one of my favorites!

V Cast Is Freakin' Cool

Verizon has launched a new service called V Cast which I for the most part ignored until I saw a demo of the service on a cell phone. It rocked!

Nutshell version - click and buy songs off your cell phone. The songs "download" to your phone via the cell network ( ie. anywhere you have cell service) - some of the phones have a 4 gig flash memory card about the size of my thumbnail. Songs can be transferred to and from your PC. Headphones plug right into the phone.

The quality of the music is stellar. You get charged for any songs bought at the end of the month on your cell bill.

Now this is the wave of the future - and in the near future TuneCore will be set up with them.

And hats off to Verizon for being the first major cell phone carrier to include indie content in the store.