February 2009 Archives

We were talking about a "morsel" of food while making a huge mess in the kitchen. Anyone who knows Latin could probably guess that the English word morsel has the Latin verb mordeo somewhere in its history. And of course mordeo means 'I bite' and its noun form is morsus. Without getting overly academically investigative about the origin of the word, my best guess is that morsel is dervied from a Latin diminutive of morsus, morsellus.

The notion of a bite has long been used as a metaphor indicate a small amount, as in the English word "bit" and the German word Bißchen and the French word morceau  a 'piece (of something)' (both derived from diminutives as well), but without an etymological dictionary handy and armed with some knowledge of historical sound changes, I'll guess that "morsel" entered the English lexicon from Norman Old French after said Normans conquered England in the 11th century. It was unlikely to have arrived later due to the modern French development which resulted in final /l/ becoming /u/. Of course that wouldn't stop the word entering then and later on, such as leal/loyal/legal and real/royal/regal (Norman/Modern French/Latin).

By the way, Mexican Spanish mordida '(a) bite' is also '(a) bribe'.

Anyway, I'm going to use the word 'morsel' as a category in my blog for the scattered thoughts that I have that might be of vague interest to someone.

One of things that is interesting about alternative digital distributors (i.e. aggregators) like TuneCore, ReverbNation and CD Baby is the retailers they service. Compared to IODA and The Orchard, they distribute to relatively few digital retailers--ten or fewer instead of the hundreds that the largest distributors service.

It's much easier for IODA to aquire new retailers than for a smaller digital distributor for the simple reason that the digital retailers are willing to do all the technical work (converting files, especially metadata, into the format required by their shop) in order to be able to sell from the vast IODA catalogue, whereas for a smaller digital distributor like ourselves, we end up doing the work ourselves because the retailers are usually unwilling to put in the work required to import a smaller catalogue.

Of course you have to ask yourself whether having your catalogue available in every little digital retailer is important to you. As of 2005, Apple was said to have 70% of the digital retail market share. This is probably lower now, with all the competition from other retailers that have entered the market, e.g. Amazon MP3, but you can probably cover 90% of the market with just a few retailers, especially if your label's genre is well-represented by a certain site, e.g. Juno for dance music.

At one point, Apple was actively looking for labels to submit their music to iTunes via iTunes Producer, an application that looks and acts much like iTunes. iTunes Producer is supposed to make it easy to send Apple your content and controls the ripping, metadata entry and upload phases of content delivery to iTunes.

Another business model is that used by Consolidated Independent (CI) in London. If you negotiate a contract with a digital retailer, they can do delivery for you. The main advantage to this is that once your catalogue is submitted, you still retain control over it. This contrasts with digital distributors who still retain control over your catalogue because the retailer has no direct agreement with you. If you change your digital distributor, your catalogue has to be taken down and re-submitted.

As far as I know, none of the other retailers is really interested in dealing with smaller catalogues because it is simply too much trouble for too little gain.