When not on Slashdot, I'm the owner of CD Baby, which was the largest provider of music to Snocap.
Snocap had everything going for them, and could have probably succeeded, but their execution was so bad that it was unbearable.
Check out my What happened with CD Baby and Snocap article, and especially the comments below it, with all these musicians so frustrated that Snocap won't reply to anybody's emails.
If I knew my little personal blog post was going to be read by any more than 2 people on earth, I could have said:
"I thought my old language was ugly, and since I needed to do a rewrite anyway, decided to do it in a new fancy framework. But it's surprisingly hard fitting an existing app into a framework. So hard that after 2 years of trying, I looked at the old language I thought was ugly and realized the problem wasn't the language, but my previously poor skills, now improved and defined by 2 years of working with this framework. I ditched the framework and rewrote in my old language, which was much smarter for our company's needs because it so easily integrated with all of our existing code."
My post was not meant to be about strengths or weaknesses in Rails or PHP in particular. It's unfortunate that is the aspect that drew all the unintentional traffic and comments.
Oh well. It's kinda funny to read hundreds of people calling me a dumbass.:-)
Longtime Slashdot reader, surprised to find my little personal blog post on Slashdot today, especially since the lead-in description framed it with the completely wrong point.
I never said "the project was cancelled because of limitations of Rails" - more like I spent two years trying to make Rails do something it wasn't meant to do, then realized my old abandoned language (PHP, in my case) would do just fine if approached with my new Rails-gained wisdom.
The job isn't finished yet, until all of Apache and MySQL and PostgreSQL and PHP and Python and and Ruby and Rails are in the package, all optimized for Solaris, all stuffed with DTrace probes, and all with developer and production support available. It won't be long.
Must just be the majors. The indies are thriving.
on
iTunes Sales 'Collapsing'
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Here in the land of the truly independent artists, iTunes sales have almost DOUBLED. iTunes is paying our clients almost a million dollars a MONTH in sales, now. (My company is one of the back-end digital distributors of audio to iTunes, Rhapsody, EMusic, etc.)
I feel like this is the same story as "CD sales are declining!" The whole time you've heard that in the news for the past 6 years, physical CD sales for small independent artists has shot WAY up.
It's like you were looking at one of those stock charts that compares two different companies' stocks. The big famous artists would be that stock whose value has fallen from $100/share to $70/share. But the independent (mostly unknown) artists are like a $1 stock that is now at $5. It's more newsworthy to talk about the big visible stock falling, but the real story down here is in the huge boost that the indies have gotten from improved distribution / availability.
We were waiting anxiously for this item to be announced, because we have about 100TB of storage (now) and add about 8TB per month. Perfect customer for these.
But, unfortunately, they're not quite as cheap as I had thought. (Friend on the inside thought Sun was going to price them at $1.25 per GB, not $2 per GB)
32 SATA-II 750g drives = 24TB, same as the Sun X4500, but for only $16,000 for the entire system (chassis, mobo, ram, drives) instead of $70,000 for the Sun Thumper. Huge difference especially if you're ordering many of them.
Another interesting point of view of this is at this article:
Switching Back to Desktop Linux, by chromatic, the technical editor of the O'Reilly Network.
Some people will likely say "But you have to spend so much time tweaking Linux to get it the way you want!" To that I respond that I don't even have the option of tweaking Mac OS X to work the way I want./blockquote.
SHORT VERSION: My company is one of the back-end providers of music to Apple iTunes, EMusic, Rhapsody, and all the other digital music services. But we sell/distribute ONLY independent music directly from the artists - no record labels.
When our sales reports started coming back from Apple, I was stumped. They were artists I had never heard of. I assumed it would be our top-sellers in the physical-CD world, but instead we had artists who had only sold 2 CDs, ever, selling $5000 in downloads.
It took a lot of research, but I figured it out : all of the top-selling albums in the digital music services were albums with cover songs. Often selling their full-album if they had even one cover song on it, which means that strangers were finding them because of that cover song, then liking their original music so much they bought the whole thing.
I'm advising all musicians I know to include one good creative (not-too-covered, not-too-obscure) cover song on their future albums, to help call attention to it in this song-based search world.
Credit where it's due, Emusic has been selling 99-cent downloads since 1998. When Steve Jobs announced it in 2003, everyone acted like it was a shocking new revolutionary idea. But some of us couldn't help but think, "Oh, you mean like Emusic?"
I'm an Emusic subscriber and love them, but there are LOTS of legal services out there, these days, selling good ol' MP3s (or even FLAC/OGG) with no DRM
and the somewhat-legal allofmp3.com for the major-label stuff.
We keep a full list of them at cdbaby.net/dd-partners (in 10 languages!). Though that list is meant mainly for our musician clients, it's a good permalink for a constantly-updating list of digital music sellers, with a short description of each.
Though we only use OpenBSD on a few of our servers (we have about 150 servers) - we NEVER buy hardware that OpenBSD doesn't support, because to us that's a good test of whether this hardware is going to last or not.
If a hardware company is so proprietary or secretive or locked-down that OpenBSD can't (or chooses not to) support it, I don't believe that company will last in the long run.
My company is one of the largest distributors of music to iTunes. I know what I'm talking about.
For a 99 cent sale, Apple pays the copyright owner 70 cents.
What the copyright owner chooses to do with that 70 cents is up to them.
If the artist sold their life, soul, and music over to a huge label in return for a massive advance, then the label is now the copyright owner (NOT the artist), and the label might pay the artist a pittance of that 70 cents. (Every contract between label and artist is different, and Apple has nothing to do with that.)
If the artist did not sell their soul to a label, then they are still the copyright owner, and the artist gets to keep the entire 70 cents.
I admire the Downward Battle guys in some ways, but their protest is misguided when they try to make Apple look like the bad guy because an artist chose to sell the rights to their music over to a big label.
It was the artist's choice give up ownership of their music. They could have remained independent but they chose the big up-front advance in return for no longer owning their own music.
Tell the potential investors that this really is 50/50, and refuse to compromise on that. It would be a fatal mistake.
In business, you'll ALWAYS have well-meaning people suggesting you go directions you don't want to. Push back. Show some backbone. Don't let others dictate your future. This is YOUR company, ONLY YOU decide how it's going to go. (In this case "you" plural : the both of you.)
ESPECIALLY at this early stage, you need to get VERY used to saying "no" to others' suggestions.
P.S. I'm "president and programmer" of my 60-person company. Yes, a computer guy can make a good CEO.
Important to note that even this MiniDisc fan-boy points out downsides to MiniDisc that completely kill it for most of us:
Even though each Hi-MD player can be used as a mass storage device under windows, Linux, OSX, and even BeOS, you cannot just drag/drop.mp3s onto it. You are forced to use SonicStage. And of course SonicStage is only available on Windows
then he ends with this:
Now, it's all too late. I'm afraid MiniDisc will slowly but surely die out.
Every time I help a friend set up Windows, it's always the first thing I do:
Control Panels --> System --> Optimize for Best Performance
It turns off ALL the fuzzy, fading, stupid stuff, and surprises them how much better it responds.
Linux/BSD? IceWM on top, but with KDE libs underneath, so you can run any KDE or Gnome apps, but don't need all that mem-hogging desktop candy just to run KMail or whatever.
Well I can tell ya from the frontlines that the INDIES (the real indies, the musicians releasing their music by themselves with no record deal whatsoever) are doing better than ever. While the rest of the industry may be dropping, this part of the industry down here is growing.
My company is one of the main providers of music to iTunes worldwide.
Knowing that iTunes Australia was launching, I did an interview with AppleTalk Australia that tells a little bit more behind-the-scenes stuff, in case you're interested.
I'm glad this is finally up-and-running. Australia has a great independent music scene (as I spoke more about in previous Slashdot comment).
blackest_k: Thanks for the nice comments. Yes when we sell the physical CD (where we warehouse it, ship it, etc) then we keep a flat $4 per CD sold/shipped, no matter whether the selling price is $10, $15, $20, whatever - that's how much it costs to do everything we do. It's actually a much smaller cut than Amazon, for example. For our digital distribution, we only keep 9%, paying 91% of all income directly to the artists. But I feel weird answering a customer-service question on Slashdot comments, so please feel free to email us (cdbaby.com/contact) for any details - I'd be glad to help.
No - it's for real. I know because my company CD Baby is the provider of over 500,000 songs to iTunes, through our Digital Distribution program. Apple just contacted us again today to make sure we were all OK with the Australian launch. They only ever do this a week before a new country launches (as we did with Japan, Europe, Canada).
I have to say, I'm very impressed with the independent music scene in Australia. There's a great spirit of independence there, helped by Triple-J Radio, a gov't-sponsored nationwide radio that actually plays a lot of truly-independent local artists, QMusic - a gov't-sponsored non-profit to develop and help local musicians, AIR, the Association of Independent Record Labels, which is run by a few passionate punks in Brisbane.
(I'm SO impressed, in fact, that we're going to be setting up a CD Baby office in Australia in a couple months!)
I moved CD Baby from New York to Portland Oregon in 2000, and I'm more impressed than ever with the cool tech community here.
If California is.com, Portland is.org in every way.
From the INCREDIBLY cool FreeGeek ("helping the needy get nerdy") - to the active Portland Linux/Unix Group to the Portland Ruby Brigade that put together the FOSCON mentioned in the OP - Portland has some great geeky stuff going on.
A few months back, I ran the exact same Craigslist help-wanted ad, looking for a great programmer for a well-paying job, in both Portland and Los Angeles Craigslist at the same time. (The job could be done from either Portland or Los Angeles.) The Portland ad was answered by about 30 brilliant programmers, all working on interesting things and seemed to be doing it for love more than money. The Los Angeles ad was answered by a couple clueless numnuts. I love Los Angeles for other reasons, but this was a telling experience.
No sales tax. Great public transportation. More hybrid cars per-capita than anywhere. Kennedy School. Free wireless broadband covers the entire city. A damn good place to live and work. And not a single tourist attraction.
And the second lesson a band learns is that it is very, very hard to get the A&R folks to look at you seriously if you have a reputation as too much of a cover band, no?
You've got the wrong idea.
A cover band is a band that IMITATES current hits.
But great musicians can do a creative version of someone else's song (ALL jazz musicians do it, for example) - an it only strengthens their career - shows who they are as an artist, not just a writer.
My company is one of the main distributors of music to Apple iTunes, Rhapsody, Napster, etc.
I gotta admit that when we started doing digital distribution two years ago, I thought it would be just a small income stream for the musicians - some extra income, maybe $5k/month combined.
But our checks from Apple et al have been over $300,000 a month so far this year! And that's just for our catalog of mostly-unknown all-independent music. (And hey for the record, 91% of all that income goes directly to the musician.)
NOTE: a lot of this discovery of independent music is thanks to cover songs - another twist I never expected.
Yes us alpha-geeks here on Slashdot may get our music from allofmp3.com or SoulSeek or whatever, but there's definitely millions paying that 99-cents-per song, or $20/month subscription out there. I get to see the detailed sales reports every month.
(Personally, I'm so impressed with Yahoo Music Unlimited, that it's making me want to use Windows again!)
Slashdot Mirror
Snocap had everything going for them, and could have probably succeeded, but their execution was so bad that it was unbearable.
Check out my What happened with CD Baby and Snocap article, and especially the comments below it, with all these musicians so frustrated that Snocap won't reply to anybody's emails.
The most brilliant idea, with bad execution, is worth nothing.
This is kind-of a follow-up to his in-depth thoughts on the Facebook platform that I found really useful, too.
It doesn't really matter.
:-)
If I knew my little personal blog post was going to be read by any more than 2 people on earth, I could have said:
"I thought my old language was ugly, and since I needed to do a rewrite anyway, decided to do it in a new fancy framework. But it's surprisingly hard fitting an existing app into a framework. So hard that after 2 years of trying, I looked at the old language I thought was ugly and realized the problem wasn't the language, but my previously poor skills, now improved and defined by 2 years of working with this framework. I ditched the framework and rewrote in my old language, which was much smarter for our company's needs because it so easily integrated with all of our existing code."
My post was not meant to be about strengths or weaknesses in Rails or PHP in particular. It's unfortunate that is the aspect that drew all the unintentional traffic and comments.
Oh well. It's kinda funny to read hundreds of people calling me a dumbass.
Longtime Slashdot reader, surprised to find my little personal blog post on Slashdot today, especially since the lead-in description framed it with the completely wrong point.
I never said "the project was cancelled because of limitations of Rails" - more like I spent two years trying to make Rails do something it wasn't meant to do, then realized my old abandoned language (PHP, in my case) would do just fine if approached with my new Rails-gained wisdom.
That's all.
I feel like this is the same story as "CD sales are declining!" The whole time you've heard that in the news for the past 6 years, physical CD sales for small independent artists has shot WAY up.
It's like you were looking at one of those stock charts that compares two different companies' stocks. The big famous artists would be that stock whose value has fallen from $100/share to $70/share. But the independent (mostly unknown) artists are like a $1 stock that is now at $5. It's more newsworthy to talk about the big visible stock falling, but the real story down here is in the huge boost that the indies have gotten from improved distribution / availability.
Check out this visual / geographic metaphor, too.
We were waiting anxiously for this item to be announced, because we have about 100TB of storage (now) and add about 8TB per month. Perfect customer for these.
d =2348
But, unfortunately, they're not quite as cheap as I had thought. (Friend on the inside thought Sun was going to price them at $1.25 per GB, not $2 per GB)
Instead, we've been using these. Very good cooling:
http://www.rackmountpro.com/productpage.php?prodi
32 SATA-II 750g drives = 24TB, same as the Sun X4500, but for only $16,000 for the entire system (chassis, mobo, ram, drives) instead of $70,000 for the Sun Thumper. Huge difference especially if you're ordering many of them.
Switching Back to Desktop Linux, by chromatic, the technical editor of the O'Reilly Network.
SHORT VERSION: My company is one of the back-end providers of music to Apple iTunes, EMusic, Rhapsody, and all the other digital music services. But we sell/distribute ONLY independent music directly from the artists - no record labels.
When our sales reports started coming back from Apple, I was stumped. They were artists I had never heard of. I assumed it would be our top-sellers in the physical-CD world, but instead we had artists who had only sold 2 CDs, ever, selling $5000 in downloads.
It took a lot of research, but I figured it out : all of the top-selling albums in the digital music services were albums with cover songs. Often selling their full-album if they had even one cover song on it, which means that strangers were finding them because of that cover song, then liking their original music so much they bought the whole thing.
I'm advising all musicians I know to include one good creative (not-too-covered, not-too-obscure) cover song on their future albums, to help call attention to it in this song-based search world.
I'm an Emusic subscriber and love them, but there are LOTS of legal services out there, these days, selling good ol' MP3s (or even FLAC/OGG) with no DRM
We keep a full list of them at cdbaby.net/dd-partners (in 10 languages!). Though that list is meant mainly for our musician clients, it's a good permalink for a constantly-updating list of digital music sellers, with a short description of each.
Though we only use OpenBSD on a few of our servers (we have about 150 servers) - we NEVER buy hardware that OpenBSD doesn't support, because to us that's a good test of whether this hardware is going to last or not.
If a hardware company is so proprietary or secretive or locked-down that OpenBSD can't (or chooses not to) support it, I don't believe that company will last in the long run.
For a 99 cent sale, Apple pays the copyright owner 70 cents.
What the copyright owner chooses to do with that 70 cents is up to them.
If the artist sold their life, soul, and music over to a huge label in return for a massive advance, then the label is now the copyright owner (NOT the artist), and the label might pay the artist a pittance of that 70 cents. (Every contract between label and artist is different, and Apple has nothing to do with that.)
If the artist did not sell their soul to a label, then they are still the copyright owner, and the artist gets to keep the entire 70 cents.
I admire the Downward Battle guys in some ways, but their protest is misguided when they try to make Apple look like the bad guy because an artist chose to sell the rights to their music over to a big label.
It was the artist's choice give up ownership of their music. They could have remained independent but they chose the big up-front advance in return for no longer owning their own music.
Tell the potential investors that this really is 50/50, and refuse to compromise on that. It would be a fatal mistake.
In business, you'll ALWAYS have well-meaning people suggesting you go directions you don't want to. Push back. Show some backbone. Don't let others dictate your future. This is YOUR company, ONLY YOU decide how it's going to go. (In this case "you" plural : the both of you.)
ESPECIALLY at this early stage, you need to get VERY used to saying "no" to others' suggestions.
P.S. I'm "president and programmer" of my 60-person company. Yes, a computer guy can make a good CEO.
Control Panels --> System --> Optimize for Best Performance
It turns off ALL the fuzzy, fading, stupid stuff, and surprises them how much better it responds.
Linux/BSD?
IceWM on top, but with KDE libs underneath, so you can run any KDE or Gnome apps, but don't need all that mem-hogging desktop candy just to run KMail or whatever.
For what it's worth:
See the CD Baby sales chart.
An interesting 2004-to-2005 summary comparison:
2004 CD sales : $7.5M
2005 CD sales: $10.3M
2004 digital sales: $0.76M
2005 digital sales: $3.1M
new CDs added in 2004: 28,285
new CDs added in 2005: 37,798
And you can always see our current numbers halfway down the page at cdbaby.com/about.
Knowing that iTunes Australia was launching, I did an interview with AppleTalk Australia that tells a little bit more behind-the-scenes stuff, in case you're interested.
I'm glad this is finally up-and-running. Australia has a great independent music scene (as I spoke more about in previous Slashdot comment).
blackest_k: Thanks for the nice comments. Yes when we sell the physical CD (where we warehouse it, ship it, etc) then we keep a flat $4 per CD sold/shipped, no matter whether the selling price is $10, $15, $20, whatever - that's how much it costs to do everything we do. It's actually a much smaller cut than Amazon, for example. For our digital distribution, we only keep 9%, paying 91% of all income directly to the artists. But I feel weird answering a customer-service question on Slashdot comments, so please feel free to email us (cdbaby.com/contact) for any details - I'd be glad to help.
I have to say, I'm very impressed with the independent music scene in Australia. There's a great spirit of independence there, helped by Triple-J Radio, a gov't-sponsored nationwide radio that actually plays a lot of truly-independent local artists, QMusic - a gov't-sponsored non-profit to develop and help local musicians, AIR, the Association of Independent Record Labels, which is run by a few passionate punks in Brisbane.
(I'm SO impressed, in fact, that we're going to be setting up a CD Baby office in Australia in a couple months!)
- Manned space exploration
- Kozmo.com
- the original Napster
- The Concorde
- GM's EV1 (interesting)
- The original Palm Pilot
- Good keyboards
- Wires
- LPs
- The Newton
(I would have put kozmo at #1. Those who used it know what I'm talkin' about.) Read the part about the EV1 car, though. Pretty interesting.If California is .com, Portland is .org in every way.
From the INCREDIBLY cool FreeGeek ("helping the needy get nerdy") - to the active Portland Linux/Unix Group to the Portland Ruby Brigade that put together the FOSCON mentioned in the OP - Portland has some great geeky stuff going on.
A few months back, I ran the exact same Craigslist help-wanted ad, looking for a great programmer for a well-paying job, in both Portland and Los Angeles Craigslist at the same time. (The job could be done from either Portland or Los Angeles.) The Portland ad was answered by about 30 brilliant programmers, all working on interesting things and seemed to be doing it for love more than money. The Los Angeles ad was answered by a couple clueless numnuts. I love Los Angeles for other reasons, but this was a telling experience.
No sales tax. Great public transportation. More hybrid cars per-capita than anywhere. Kennedy School. Free wireless broadband covers the entire city. A damn good place to live and work. And not a single tourist attraction.
You've got the wrong idea.
A cover band is a band that IMITATES current hits.
But great musicians can do a creative version of someone else's song (ALL jazz musicians do it, for example) - an it only strengthens their career - shows who they are as an artist, not just a writer.
Because I'm a paying Slashdot member which means I saw the story posted a full 20 minutes or so before the non-paying browsers see it.
So there. :-)
I gotta admit that when we started doing digital distribution two years ago, I thought it would be just a small income stream for the musicians - some extra income, maybe $5k/month combined.
But our checks from Apple et al have been over $300,000 a month so far this year! And that's just for our catalog of mostly-unknown all-independent music. (And hey for the record, 91% of all that income goes directly to the musician.)
NOTE: a lot of this discovery of independent music is thanks to cover songs - another twist I never expected.
Yes us alpha-geeks here on Slashdot may get our music from allofmp3.com or SoulSeek or whatever, but there's definitely millions paying that 99-cents-per song, or $20/month subscription out there. I get to see the detailed sales reports every month.
(Personally, I'm so impressed with Yahoo Music Unlimited, that it's making me want to use Windows again!)