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Amazon & TuneCore To Cut Out the RIAA Middleman
eldavojohn writes "So you're an aspiring band and you haven't signed with a record label. Maybe you've got a fan base interested in purchasing your stuff but you're not really into accounting? Enter Amazon's partnership with TuneCore, a CD printing and music distribution service. You want to sell a full album on Amazon of you brushing your teeth? $31. And you get about 40% back on sales, so selling nine digital copies of your CD will put you back in the black. There you have it, public availability on one of the largest online commerce sites for $31 — no RIAA involved!" TuneCore's CEO put it this way: "As an artist, you have unlimited physical inventory, made on demand, with no [sic] upfront costs and worldwide distribution to anyone who orders it at Amazon.com."
I could legitimately see this as being the beginning of the end for the RIAA, and I've never thought that before. It makes sense that it would take a big media vendor with a well-established user community, combining manufacturing with sales.
This would be fantastic if I were a musician. No inventory. No worrying about manufacturnig. And you get a percentage of revenue that you won't see anywhere else. The general Amazon community will make marketing a *lot* easier than it would be otherwise. All in all, it seems to make the RIAA meaningless. I really think indie bands might be able to make this work. I'm looking forward to shopping for music on this and know the RIAA ain't getting a dime.
It was my understanding that the band paid $31 as sort of a "starting fee". After that initial $31, there is nothing more to pay (that is, if I understood what I read correctly). They're not trying to -sell- the discs for $31 a pop.
You're close, it's $31 a year. Which is why there's no "upfront costs" as the quote says at the bottom of the summary but instead a $31/year. Which is still really really cheap. Interestingly enough, Wired uses "upfront" costs to describe it, from the article:
Tunecore will charge just $31 a year in upfront fees to handle a 10-track CD from pressing to delivery, passing all other costs through to the buyer. In other words, the service promises to remove nearly all of the risks of short-run CD manufacturing, which can cost musicians hundreds or even thousands of dollars for discs that rarely sell enough to cover expenses.
I think people are missing the big picture where you don't have to go to multiple services for your music. You'll be able to buy big names like U2 and Weezer right next to little high school rock bands and indie artists. You make that possible so that the people don't know whether they're buying RIAA or not and who knows? Maybe the musician will decide the RIAA route is not really worth it?
My work here is dung.
Don't bite the hand that feeds you. Goodbye.
I'm sorry, but unless you want to be the next Hoobastank or some such nonsense, those things are completely unnecessary.
If you want to actually sell enough CDs (or novels, or software, or greetings cards, or whatever) to make anything like a living, you need marketing.
If you write the Great American Novel, put it up on Lulu, and wait for the income to roll in, you'll sell 20 copies if you're lucky. To do better you've got to send review copies to magazines and web sites, persuade them you're worth interviewing for an article, get some viral marketing going for your product etc.
The same would go for a CD, even if you're not going for the mainstream. Get a reputation for live shows. Get written about in the specialist press. Get played on specialist radio shows or net radio. Get blogged about.
The OP's right. Traditional record labels do all this stuff, and that's part of where the money goes.
Still, it's all stuff you can DIY, or have done separately.
No one that knows about this service would sign unless they already have major sales...
Unfortunately this still doesn't provide a good alternative to one important service the major record labels provide: promotion.
Just because you put your independent band up on MySpace and SonicBids and your own website and sell your songs on iTunes and your CD on CDBaby doesn't magically make everyone in the world suddenly know you exist and want to buy your stuff. Somehow they still have to stumble across you in the first place, out of the trillions of other bands who have done the same as you.
This Amazon service is awesome, and it's part of a much larger trend that will ultimately make the major labels obsolete, but there's still more work to be done.
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein
Unfortunately this still doesn't provide a good alternative to one important service the major record labels provide: promotion.
Well, this is the essence of what the future of the Record industry is, isn't it? You have two distinct businesses that are finally getting separated. On the one hand, you have the music sales group which makes money based on sales of the actual music. On the other, you have a marketing/promotion group which makes money off of concerts and the like. The former is a dead business model that'll go away with services like the one mentioned in this story. The latter is something that an agent or a marketing company or a PR firm can do. Really, this is what a record company will eventually evolve to.