iTunes Indie Meeting Notes

BWJones writes "The CD baby! site contains notes taken from the indie music meeting recently held at Apple. Interesting statistics revealed were that there are about 500k songs/week being downloaded from the iTunes Music store and that 45% of songs are being purchased as albums. Other interesting items of note are that Apple is treating everyone as equvalents in that all labels receive equal treatment with the same deal, the same agreements and you work with the same team of people. What's more is that Apple cuts a check EVERY MONTH which is huge for the smaller labels." Wired has another story about iTunes which notes that what Jobs taketh away, the community is bringing back.

Comments

I suppose all we could hope for now is

[gsfprez]

to know what happened in the meeting... :-(

While the CD Baby page has not been taken down, its been neutered - all relevant info has been removed and I think its obvious why.

Apple only gets about 6-12 months to have their innovations be innovations before someone else copies them.. putting out the info now, instead of in the 90ish days when the details will all be public, only gives MS and Real a head-start on their idea copying.

I'm perfectly willing to wait and see.... tho other sources have already noted that Apple has mentioned a iTMS Compression tool to allow Indie's the ability to compress their own music on their own machines to make their music ready for sale on the iTMS.

and if that's true.. that kicks fscking ass.

Go Apple, you guys r0x0r.

</16 year old pimple faced Apple Fanboy mode>

(note: i'm not bashing their copying of Apple's ideas, i'm only stating fact)

Small labels will benefit from the ignorant giants

[Anonymous Coward]

(a little OT)

Thanks to companies like Apple, the smaller labels will really reap the benefits of getting their music out there without heavy tampering to 'prevent' piracy.

I work for a music publication, and it's interesting to see which companies ignore the 'threat' of piracy, and which ones try to fight it.

For example, the new Cradle of Filth arrived with a hand-signed number on the CD, and a b/w CD case with a skull and cross bones on it, warning me (the music critic) that "this disc is watermark protected" whatever that means.

Meanwhile, the new Type O Negative arrived with a 10 second commericial attached (i.e. spliced into) each song ("Your listening to the new Type O Negative, in stores next month"). This CD will NOT get press in our publication, since it's hard to get into a CD when every 3-4 minutes some recorded message comes on; nice job, record executives. Way to prevent piracy!

DRM

[Phroggy]

One of the things I've been wondering is, if an indie label wants to make their own songs available without DRM, will Apple let them do so on the iTunes Music Store, or is DRM absolutely required? What if the band wants to sell unrestricted AAC files? What about MP3?

Of course I expect most of them to want the DRM, but some may not.

Re:All this talk and it's MAC only?

[dasmegabyte]

Exactly the point. If us lowly mac users everybody shits on can generate this much talk (and this much real profit for record labels), just think what'll happen when iTunes for PC hits the market.

I'd also love to see iTunes on setup top boxes. God, the thought of a big white multimedia box with a few hundred gigs of space and a high def display, digital output and a friendly engraved apple gets me all excited about my sound system again.