Recently in Music Business Category

So this morning, I performed my usual checks on various projects we have running. One of the things I do is check up on sites where we've found links to illegal downloads of our music and see if anything has changed. (I'm in the process of fully automating this.) Anyway, it turns out that one "blogger" didn't get the message when I sent takedown notices to all the sites he had hosting downloads. This one is particularly pernicious because he's not only uploaded one of our new releases, but he's uploaded an ultra-limited new release from a series we just don't make much money on at all (because it's limited and because the pricing is quite low), but still do because we love it. Anyway, he's now gone and uploaded the release again and I've had to re-issue takedown notices for everything.

It's not like the poster even reviewed the release or created anything of his own. He just copied the release text that I wrote, pasted it into his blog, and linked to the actual release he uploaded elsewhere.

I get really angry about this because it ruins the limited nature of the release, and makes it harder for us to be able to afford doing the series. I know that people look for the illegal downloads first because on our last release from this series, the first searches that landed on our site were all "release +filesharingsite" searches. So before many people even look for a legitimate way of getting the music (which in this case, they've very, very likely heard live), they're looking to download it for "free".

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.