Slashdot Mirror
Where Indie Artists Get Everything
anonicon writes "From the same people who brought you the Web's first corrupt CDs tracking list comes the first site where independent musicians receive 100% of the money that fans pay for their music or merchandise (of course, after the credit card company takes their cut from the payment). More information can be had here or here."
No posters here yet, but revolutions take time
Obligatory link to an article by Courtney Love:
Courtney Love does the math
The final score?
Band: $0.00
Record Label: $6,600,000.00
It's nice to see someone try to make it without the RIAA et al. I hope this kind of thing becomes more common.
People: Please support these guys even if you hate their music. If they turn a profit, other bands will follow suite.
I'm not Seth.
Don't you think that this wonderful concept should have a few artists to start with --- exactly whom is participating in this revolution? They should have prominence on this site -- the "founding fathers" as it were.
I want my old mtv! (where they played MUSIC videos)
Good idea... no artists yet though (at least in the half-dozen genres that I checked).
That site has been great... particularly for finding crippled/broken CDs BEFORE you buy the stinkin things. I'm a fan, primarily because I don't own a regular CD player... but I own four computers with CDROM drives.
Well done, charles... well done.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
Could the Slashdot editors possibly have taken this seriously??! This is a small website with zero artists. A good thing I guess, but definetly not an industry revolution
These things do "take time".
What makes a man want to be a mouse? (Python's Flying Circus)
If this thing ever takes off (they're at zero artists right now... not a good sign), I'm just curious as to how Fat Chuck is going to pay for bandwidth. Anyone can put up a website. I'll believe that they take 0% when I see it. That's like opening a retail store and selling everything for what it costs you. Sure, the customers are happy, but you have expenses, and with zero profit, you won't be able to stay open for long.
They do take some money. It costs $60 for the first year and $40 for every year after that (as seen here)
Even if they didn't ask for payment they might still take donations or some well meaning people might choose to fund it out of their own pockets (as with the Wikpedia)
In all seriousness, I think that it's a really good idea, if they can pull it off. The problems with signing to a major label are covered nicely in an article that can be found here {http://www.arancidamoeba.com/mrr/problemwithmusic .html), and trying to market your music by yourself can be an exercise in utter futility. There's both safety and promotion capital in numbers.
Here's hoping... *crosses fingers*
Doing my level best to piss off the religious right wing...
This service doesn't add much to what's already out there. You have to pay them $60 for the first year, just to get a subdomain listing that shows your CDs, links to your website, and lets people order your stuff. Then, if somebody does order something, you get an email and have to process the order and send it out. The only thing they do is handle the monetary transaction.
How is this any better than musicians setting up their own site and using paypal (which takes out a lower percentage for credit card charges)?
This doesn't seem like a revolution, just a way to make money off wannabe musicians that think they might sell something.
Totally ghost written. That doesn't make it BAD, and I'm not casting dispersions on Courtney Love- I think its admirable that she would use her fame as soap box to tell the Truth, so props to her. But something about her doesn't strike me as a researcher.
Obligatory Steve Albini article
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Could it be that the site is European (judging from the flags on the page) and so they have better access to information about European CDs?
Surely the bands have costs of their own. They have to spend money on marketing, recording, persuading radio stations to play the music. Stuff like that. A record contract bundles this al up into one packages (and then overcharges horrendously - that's monopolies for you), but if you don;t use a record comapny, how will people know to buy your music?
perhaps you two should consider contacting fat chuck, see if you can get your music on his site
1) "start the revolution"
2) get your music listed while its still being hit really hard by slashdot
just an idea
Selling software wont make you money, selling a service will.
My brother-on-law sells on CD Baby and seems pleased. Not sure how they structure the deal, but the basic idea is to allow independent artists to get most of the money.
None of these sites solve the much larger problem of artist marketing, IMO. That's the one service that the record companies offer to the artists that no one else can get close to (in part because they lock competitors out of radio access, for example). There's room in the market for someone to do that, but they're going to have to find other means of getting to the customer other than radio (sites like Epitonic.com are a good step in that direction).
I have been using World Party Music (http://www.wpmusic.com) for several years and it is much more convenient. They charge a flat fee of $1.00 for handling, they do all the inventory handling, shipping, and just send me a check for the amount of my sales minus $1.00 for each sale. They charge the customer the shipping charges and they are responsible for any taxes on the sale.
This has already been done before. Go take a look (and listen) at cdbaby. They have over 34,000 artists, and a lot of them are pretty darn good. I buy most of my music there.
Your sig mentions EMusic. I listen to a lot of jazz. For the price of a CD every month, I get unlimited *legal* MP3 downloads of classic stuff. Bought a Penguin guide to jazz on CD to help sort through EMusic's collection, and have pulled maybe 11G of tunes in three months (and I haven't been hitting it that hard). It's practically more than one can listen to.
I guess it's a product life-cycle thing. Relatively few people are buying classic jazz these days (compared to top 40/pop/alternative), so the record labels are figuring they'll take what they can get for it.
he's charging artists to list their merch there. i assume this is how he plans to run the site.
As for 0 artists, you're right. We launched about 36-48 hours ago, the idea's been in development for about 6 months.
:-) Remember, if there was no opportunity to stay in business, the idea wouldn't have been started. We're not interested in being a dot-bomb.
Per bandwidth, 300gb/mo is $95.00. If I need more, I can get 2tb/mo for about $600/mo.
As far as keeping 0%, that's absolutely no joke. When you pay for an artist's CD, the money moves from your bank through the processor (2CheckOut) directly to the artist. We keep nothing because we're not even in the payment stream.
My expenses for now are $10/month for cheap hosting. I think I can handle it.
Peace.
Bandwidth is cheap. Ads are not cheap since they generally alienate your audience and cost you visitors (pop-ups! pop-unders! egads, the horrors!).
For more info:
http://www.fatchucks.com/about.html
Scroll to the end. No ads.
Actually, because of the Verizon case, I have decided to boycott all commercially recorded music which forbid the rights to free distribution. By boycott, I don't merely mean "refusing to buy" CD's. I mean refusing even to listen or download such music (even illegally). Yes, that probably means that I will no longer listen to Philip Glass, Suzanne Vega, etc. Once they wise up and liberalize their licenses, I might consider listening to them again. And I might also consider checking their CD's out of the library (whenever I feel a pang of nostalgia, in the same way that a Russian might for a moment miss a gulag's watery soup).
The restrictive licenses of music companies essentially lock commercial music in the vault. I'm not interested in picking locks anymore just for a momentary glimpse at these so-called "precious" flowers. I'm interested in enjoying what is free out in the free air. Let all those "precious" flowers in the vault lose their color, rot away and turn into crap. Good riddance.
We as creative artists need to wean ourselves from this enslavement that we call "copyright enforcement." The people and companies who benefit by starving artists, drafting exploitative contracts and preventing works of art from being distributed freely deserve nothing less than our contempt.
You may say: how could I survive without vault music? Simple. If the music rots away in the vault, it was already dead to begin with. Who wants to keep dead flowers around? Instead of locking flowers in the vault, it is better to appreciate them in the open where it's easy to pick and admire. We are like bees admiring the flowers all around us, flitting about, taking what we need and moving on (and propagating the beauty of what we see at the same time). Flowers look pretty among other flowers, not inside some ugly dirty vault guarded by lawyers with vulture-like beaks. As the public areas become more covered with flowers, the desire to possess the rotting heaps in the vault will seem more bizzare, less relevant. The best way to increase the number of flowers in this world is to open the gardens up to bees. Anyway, it is folly to think that a group of lawyers (and that is essentially what a music company is ) owns a song or a human voice or an image. The copyright to Beauty is owned by one person, and that is God. His lawyers are ruthless and know the law of nature backwards and forwards. The license they enforce allows infinite creation and multiplication, but banishes those who say beauty belongs to one.
Freeing myself from the music of the vault provides an opportunity to learn about artists with more enlightened views toward distribution. I plan to patronize them in many ways, including donations. Also, I plan to attend more concerts and still pay for my commercial-free Internet radio ($5 a month) until decent creative commons radio stations emerge. It doesn't mean that I am opposed to paying money for music per se. But when I pay for music, I want either to have free distribution rights and/or the certainty that the artist is receiving at least 50% of the money I am paying. What do artists for major labels now receive? 1%?
Actually lawyers are not completely the culprit here. It would be a trivial matter for lawyers on either the artist's or industry's side to draft a limited duration copyright. All ownership rights could expire after about 5 or 10 years. Artists are partially to blame for not insis
Robert Nagle, Idiotprogrammer, Houston
Some claim this has been done before with CD Baby. CD Baby (as mentioned in another post) takes $4 per CD sold, plus shipping and handling. Others mention PayPal, obviously forgetting the problems exposed recently with PayPay.
Chuck's site is a popular site already with the corrupt CD list, and it's only a matter of time before they come. So, rather then pan the idea because it may not look professional or because it doesn't have any artists signed up yet, applaud it and Chuck for wanting to do the right thing for the artist, giving them the money they deserve.
tinfoilmedia
Severed Heads also offer improved versions of their older stuff - and the latest album (Op) comes with a key to access 'upgrades' - i.e. extra songs and new versions. On top of all this, you can hear just about everything they sell as a (low bandwidth) MP3 before you buy.
Cut up the middleman!
Who would believe in penguins,unless he had seen them? Conor O Brien - Across Three Oceans
Hi Anon!
I pay $9.95/month for 30gb of traffic at hostforweb.com, a pretty good hosting company. If I need to go to 300gb/month, they charge 95.00. The next step up in case things get crazy is sanethosting.com:
http://www.sanethosting.com/
They charge $200/month for colocated hosting (including 330gb of transfer) and $99/month for every 330gb block after #1.
Hope this helps!
Chuck
Hi Nasarius.
You're right and you're wrong. You're absolutely right that you can sign up for your own merchant account at 2CheckOut for $49 and take it from there.
The rest of the pie is where you're somewhat wrong. Besides hosting their page at artist.fatchucks.com, we also take care of all these items:
Creating the shopping links and variable shipping for each item the artist wants to sell, both on our end and on the 2CO end.
Taking care of scanning and editing the album art so that people can see what they're buying, adding the track lists, making fan and media reviews about the artist centrally available, and otherwise providing a central location for fans to find info on the artist.
Providing order and customer support help for artists who need help handling the shipping and ordering aspects to their account when there's an issue.
Creating one location and one contact point for both artists and customers to talk to when they need the tools we provide, instead of having to deal with X parties, each of whom have their own agendas. We're here for both artists and the public.
And of course, if the idea is so-so, why hasn't anyone thought to harness the off-the-shelf tools that are publicly available to create a service that helps Indies this way? I looked for months and no one's doing it.
Peace,
Chuck
MP3 sound samples (full songs) you can download off our site.
All we did was upload (we snailmailed the CD for replication) our info, all we have to do with fulfillment is wait for them to send the checks. They handle the credit card stuff and create the goods on demand. The prices are a bit high, but creating stuff on a one-off basis is expensive even with everything basically automated.
Check out our site... it's in the sig below.
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