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Earlier today I was reviewing the statistics from the our web shop and noticed that quite a few people/sites have been linking to our shop release images directly (so-called "hotlinking"). This is an irritant because it means that our bandwidth gets used for things that don't really have anything to do with the shop and that costs us some money if it happens a lot, and worse yet, at least one of the hotlinks was from a blog that is used to distribute illegal downloads.

It's hard to get statistics about how much illegal downloading actually takes place, but since they linked to our image, our server faithfully kept track of how many times someone loaded that image on the blog. In the month of October, that image was downloaded 31,000 times and so far in November, it's at 12,300 hits. That's a lot of hits for one release on a small independent label.

As an aside, I've since taken steps to make sure that hotlinking on our site doesn't work very well. I'm sure they'll be surprised to see the images have changed.

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.