Christmas and Glowsticks – Getting the distribution right this time.
I finished “Christmas and Glowsticks” yesterday and uploaded it to www.catapultdistribution.com, who is my “middle-man” to iTunes, Amazon.mp3, Rhapsody, eMusic, Napster, and many other online music distributors.
I also signed up with www.bandcamp.com and uploaded all of the “Christmas and Glowsticks” tracks for independent distribution.
I’ve done a lot of research, and believe that I have chosen wisely this year.
I chose www.catapultdistribution.com for digital delivery for three reasons:
- They distribute to a ton of stores–all the main ones, plus all of the worldwide iTunes stores.
- The fee is a flat rate of $25, with no yearly renewal. They also take 9% of all sales, after the store itself takes its cut of the money.
- I would have used www.cdbaby.com, but they’ve been getting a lot of negative buzz lately, and I decided to stay away.
Catapult Distribution’s web interface is easy to navigate, and easily figured out how to get my music in their hands. One item I didn’t like is that I had to convert the times of the songs into seconds. It seems like if I’m uploading my song to their site, their software should be able to figure out the length of the song on their end.
Last year I used www.e-junkie.com for my independent digital downloads. I used them because they had a 45 day free trial with zero fees. Also, I could do the “pay what you want” model using their system. It worked very well.
This year, I’m using Bandcamp for my independent distribution. The Bandcamp website is unbelievably easy to use. Within minutes, I had a professional page, and music uploaded. The upload speed I had with www.bandcamp.com was at least four times faster than the uploads to www.catapultdistribution.com. So far, I have been very impressed with Bandcamp.
Bandcamp doesn’t take a cut of the profits made from selling music, but Paypal does have a fee for using their service. Ordinarily, Paypal is set up for large-ish transactions, like over $10 dollars. And for transactions over ten dollars, Paypal works very well. But since Bandcamp makes it possible to sell single songs, the usual flat fee wouldn’t be very practical. Here is what the Bandcamp website says:
PayPal’s standard transaction fee works out to about 33 cents for a $1 payment and 45 cents for a $5 payment (in U.S. dollars). Luckily, they provide an alternative designed for lower-priced items called the “micropayments rate.” Using micropayments, the fee is 10 cents for a $1 payment and 30 cents for a $5 payment.
So I signed up for micropayments on my paypal account, but now, if I sell anything big on ebay, then I’ll get hit with a higher rate. This trade-off seems unnecessary.
—-
For context, last year, I used TuneCore to digitally distribute my first album “Babies Don’t Have Hands”. Tunecore has a flat rate, but requires a yearly renewal. What’s great about Tunecore is that they don’t take a percentage of your sales. So, if you are a well-known artist, or even a medium well-known artist, and you know that you are going to sell a lot of digital downloads, then it makes sense to have a flat fee, and then no percentage taken out of sales. But for beginners, with no fans and no marketing, this makes less sense because of the yearly fee that might be more than the amount you make from sales. Also, Tunecore doesn’t really do physical distribution of CD’s. They have a workaround, but it’s not integrated.
On the other hand, CD Baby does do physical distribution of CD’s. CD Baby has a flat fee that you only have to pay once, and then they handle digital distribution and physical distribution FOREVER. But, the trade-off is that CD Baby takes 9% of all digital sales.
So, I went with both.
I first went with Tunecore. Tunecore seemed to be better for digital distribution. Also, they had the cheapest UPC bar code I could find. Later, I also signed on with CD Baby and sent them five CDs, but I didn’t sign up with their digital distribution (because I already had it with Tunecore).
Over the year, I had three or four album downloads through iTunes. I got a few pennies from streaming. I sold two CDs through CD Baby. Altogether, I invested over a hundred dollars on distribution, and made a little over forty.
So, after a year, I didn’t renew with Tunecore, so presumably my album was removed from online distributors…
…I just checked in with Tunecore. I have a balance of 27 cents from streaming off Rhapsody and Napster.
So this year I’m using Catapult Distribution for online distribution, and Bandcamp for independent sales. I’ll let you know what I think of them after I start getting some traffic and downloads.
Thanks for this, Joel. Yours is an interesting case, and it foregrounds something I tell people all the time: today, you can shop around for almost every part of your music career. You can find the best person or company to do your distribution, your marketing, your mixing and mastering–every part of being a recording musician.
TuneCore was always meant to be at least one element of that, but it can’t exist in a vacuum. We’ve tried to provide all the tools an artist might need, including know-how for covers and mechanical licensing, options for mixing/mastering, production of T-shirts, stickers, even physical CDs in low and high run. They’re all tools, like digital distribution into Amazon, and everyone has to search for themselves which is the best fit. What a great change from the old days!
The reason why I still feel TuneCore is the right way to go is that percentage, and your example proves it. Your music was only selling a little bit, no doubt in part because (I suspect) you didn’t have a major marketing campaign behind it. Or you did, and it simply didn’t catch fire with fans. Either way, it was YOU promoting your album, pushing it or not, marketing it or not, and no one should reap the rewards but you. I urge those who use TuneCore to do it in tandem with a huge push, as much effort into getting their music out there, heard, wanted, by people, as the effort that was put into writing, performing and recording the music. We even try to help those with no money or contacts in this industry to find ways to promote themselves. Believe me, all successful bands do it.
At some point, either by touring your butt off, paying good money to a marketer, a PR agent, or just relentlessly viral-marketing the heck out of yourself, you’re going to raise awareness of and create demand for your music. That’s when your hard effort should pay you, 100%. Distributors that take a percentage without helping you bust your hump are simply sitting back, waiting for you to work hard so their 9% will start paying off. Philosophically, that bugs me.
The cold reality is, putting music into iTunes and the other digital music stores isn’t that hard. Now you’re lost in a giant catalog, and the only way people will find you is if you work hard to be found. Someone who puts their music up and, after a year with TuneCore, finds they got no sales even after a ton of hard work, well–don’t pay renewal, your music is clearly ahead of your time. If people put it up and don’t work off their tails promoting it, then of course renewal might be more than the year’s earnings, but that’s not reason to find another distributor who won’t charge a yearly, they’re just waiting for you to market yourself, so you can earn money for them. It’s just not right.
Anyway, thanks for letting me respond. We’re always improving our systems, making things faster and easier, making the widget more powerful, listening to folks to see what they want most. I’m glad you found us so easy and helpful while you were aboard. I welcome you back, too–especially when the day comes that the world finds your music, because you moved heaven and earth (and sunk in a ton of money) to get it known, and you want to keep 100% of it.
Thanks again.
–Peter
peter@tunecore.com
Peter, thanks so much for responding. Looks like your alert system for the keyword “tunecore” is working.
There is a threshold of sales where the Tunecore model (yearly fee, no percentage) pays better than the no-yearly-fee-percentage model. And for artists who reach that threshold, Tunecore is certainly the way to go. If I was Bono and was releasing a solo album, Tunecore would be the way to to go. But for artists who are going to sell only a few downloads a year, and who won’t reach that high sales threshold, the Tunecore model is taking the musician’s money and the artist is not making back their initial investment.
I can already hear the justification: Tunecore is just providing a service. Everything past that service is the responsibility of the artist: promotion, touring, merchandise. And if the artist does his or her job, then success will follow, and the artist should get 100% of the rewards. This is a similar justification http://www.taxi.com uses: they are simply providing a service, to make industry listings available, to screen the listings, and to deliver the forwarded songs to the music supervisor. But this generates tens of thousands of failed submissions, and hundreds of thousands of uncompensated hours of work for musicians, who are already poor, and could be using this time working on their own projects, or at a real paying job, rather than on tip-sheet listings with a small chance of a placement. Sure the company has to make its money, but there are unintentional consequences of these services that the companies ignore.
When I first signed with Tunecore, I wrote that Tunecore would be the clear choice if it made an effort to promote the artists who signed on. But, since Tunecore doesn’t any additional money when an album sells well, there is no incentive for Tunecore to increase artists’ sales by helping promote the artists who sign with them.
On the other hand, a company that is taking a percentage of sales does have an interest in the development of their artists’ careers, and should actively work to promote them.
That is something that Tunecore doesn’t talk about. With a flat fee, there is no incentive to help the artists make more sales.
ReverbNation and especially Bandcamp are working to make it ultra-simple to help promote musicians, with their happy and easy to make homepages for your music, the nice streaming widgets, Bandcamp’s micropayments, etc. Why would Tunecore want to provide services like these? There would be no financial gain because they aren’t taking a percentage of sales.
However, if Tunecore did have a way for artists to make homepages, widgets, physical sales, and get direct micropayments for individual songs, think of how many more artists would flock to Tunecore for their digital distribution. There is a reason why there are so many threads on the internet comparing all the digital distributors: because none of them provide all the services musicians want. The first company that does will be a magnet for sales. CD Baby used to be a one-stop no-brainer for musicians, but not so much anymore.
Because there’s no clear choice, I have to try new things, which is why I’m trying Catapult Distribution and Bandcamp. Right now, I don’t have much money, and I can’t see myself paying for a yearly renewal for anything, so I went with Catapult, who has a lower flat fee, but takes a percentage. Right now, in my situation, in this economy, in this job market, this is the right choice. On another note, WaTunes’ free distribution appears to be barking at the heels of all the digital distribution companies. I didn’t go with WaTunes because it appears to appeal more to urban music, they don’t have quite as wide distribution as Catapult, and also I just don’t like the idea of something as important as my music’s distribution being free. That’s counterintuitive, isn’t it? So, once again, the choices have become confusing.
If I have an album with Tunecore, and then I get booked on Oprah, and the album sells 100,000 copies overnight, I’ll be very thankful that I am with Tunecore, as that would save me ~90,000 dollars.
The thing is, though, that when you’re making a million dollars, $90,000 will hurt, but it won’t hurt that badly. And when an artist achieves that level, then by all means, switch to Tunecore, since that’s the best model for high sales albums, because of the flat-fee-no-percentage system.
But if you’re making a few hundred dollars a year off of digital sales, let’s say $500, then you’re losing $45 dollars (at 9%) a year by using a pay-once-percentage model, and making $455. Sure it hurts to lose the $45, but the percentage of loss feels less significant at this level of sales, and at least I’m not having to pay yearly fee every year to keep the album available.
The real question is, why doesn’t iTunes make it easy for artists to upload their music themselves, and cut out the middle man. That would put all of the digital distributors out of business. Apple would chug along happily taking 30% out of each sale, and it wouldn’t cost the musician anything. If iTunes made this possible, it would force the current digital distributors to make their products more competitive. That Apple hasn’t done this is mystifying.
Joel
Hi Joe,
I completely understand your confusion in choosing the right distribution model for your needs and I’m all for being able to present a different alternative. I believe that any approach is good and that whatever decision you make should be based on the type of success you want to have in your music career. In today’s age, there are many types of ways to distribute music into the iTunes Store. No longer is there a gap in sales or any upfront charges. Now you have the power to grow first and expand later.
Now in WaTunes case, our digital distribution program doesn’t deliver to all the digital stores for free (except for iTunes worldwide). With WaTunes, we give you the tools that is out there to be able to showcase your music to your fans, communicate with them directly, and other social features through WaTunes very own Social Platform. To offer iTunes (a true free distribution model), I wouldn’t exactly say its counter intuitive because as an artist, for the first time in history, you’re now put in a perfect position to earn free, hard-earned, and well-deserved money from your music. As you grow in your music, so do does WaTunes as a distributor.
Then, lets say you grow in catalogue and sales, upgrade to the WaTunes VIP for $12.95 per month which gets your music into not just the major digital services (like iTunes, Amazon, Rhapsody, and eMusic) but also the top mobile stores (like AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile) and gaming consoles (like Playstation 3).
The best part about WaTunes is that even if you use a different distributor like Catapult or ReverbNation, you can still use WaTunes! The WaTunes digital distribution service is completely optional and is a complimentary service to the WaTunes Social Platform.
Another cool deal is that we don’t just focus on urban music. WaTunes have an extensive catalogue expanding every genre in the book. We also work closely with you to promote your music (getting you iTunes features, other placements, contests, etc.).
If you have any questions regarding WaTunes or anything regarding the industry, please shoot us a line and I personally would be more than happy to assist you. I wish you the best in your music endeavors regardless of your digital distribution service.
Best,
Kevin Rivers
CEO, WaTunes
info@watunes.com
Something here gives me a moment’s pause–you do know we have free pages for all, right? And a streaming widget that includes video, picture, even the ability for you to ask your fans to sign up with you? If you missed it, we really need to make sure we tell people about it! We worked really hard on these widgets and pages and much more, I’d hate to think people didn’t know about them!
–Peter
peter@tunecore.com
Hm. I even have a Tunecore page, and had completely forgotten about it. It seems to be a little wonky on the formatting right now: http://www.tunecore.com/music/thegoaheadand.
I went and logged into my Tunecore account, and you’re right, there is a widget, although mine doesn’t work right now because I didn’t pay for this year’s renewal. It looks nice, so thanks for telling me about it.
How hard is it to get on iTunes? How come WaTunes can do it for free? What’s the big mystery? Why do we need third parties? Why is this process not transparent?
Currently, no one company seems to have everything I need. Why is that?
You are both very responsive, and that gives your companies quite a leg up on the competition. Because the internet, despite it’s interactiveness, is a very cold, anonymous place.
Kevin, I reaffirm my assertion that it is counterintuitive to not pay for this service. Consumers are programmed to seek out deals, but when a deal sounds too good to be true, it usually is. Strange, but true. One of the reasons I originally didn’t even consider WaTunes is because I figured that making the distribution free would be overloading your systems and would cause a delay in my album, “Christmas and Glowsticks” distribution. Obviously, since it’s early November, and my album is a Christmas album, getting it distributed quickly is important. I only have a few weeks to make all my sales.
Peter, what is the “break-even” threshold when Tunecore customers break-even on using Tunecore as their digital distributor? How many digital sales (say, in iTunes) does an artist need to make to break even? This seems like a key point for emerging artists. Is it $20 dollars a year? That seems logical–so that amounts to between 26 and 27 single song downloads, or just under three albums at ten dollars an album downloaded a year to recover the Tunecore renewal fee.
Let me take a stab at it, using my liberal-arts-major-math-skills. Using my current distributor, who takes 9% of sales, but does not have a yearly renewal fee, if I sell a hundred albums at ten dollars an album, that’s $1000. Then iTunes takes its 30%, I’m making $700. Then my distributor takes 9%, which is $63 dollars, now I’m making $637 dollars. And then subtract the initial distribution fee of $25 dollars, and you get $612 dollars in the first year, and $637 every year after that.
Using Tunecore, I’m making the full $700, minus the $20 yearly fee, so that’s $680 dollars. If you figure in the initial distribution to all the stores, then you have to subtract another $20+ dollars. Giving you $660 in the first year, and $680 every year after that.
So in this scenario, with 100 albums sold, Tunecore wins by $48 the first year, and by $43 every year after that.
I need to get back to actually making music, rather than this.
Hi Joel,
I’d be more than happy to answer your questions below:
Q: “How hard is it to get on iTunes? How come WaTunes can do it for free? What’s the big mystery? Why do we need third parties? Why is this process not transparent?”
A: Being an independent artist with a small catalog is extremely difficult to get on the iTunes Store. The reason is because iTunes deals with a lot of technical aspects of content delivery and processing which would cost them a lot more money if they offer each artist to go direct. As a simple solution they’ve decided to work with distribution companies (Label/Content Providers) such as WaTunes who has an extensive catalog to be able to make their cost less and provide the artist what they want: Getting their music up on iTunes. iTunes is semi-selective on who they choose to be a Content Provider for them.
Q: “Kevin, I reaffirm my assertion that it is counterintuitive to not pay for this service. Consumers are programmed to seek out deals, but when a deal sounds too good to be true, it usually is. Strange, but true. One of the reasons I originally didn’t even consider WaTunes is because I figured that making the distribution free would be overloading your systems and would cause a delay in my album, “Christmas and Glowsticks” distribution. Obviously, since it’s early November, and my album is a Christmas album, getting it distributed quickly is important. I only have a few weeks to make all my sales.”
A: That’s what separates us from that saying. What we offer is true and its good. We’ve help thousands of artists get their contents on iTunes for free since our huge announcement in March and its only the beginning of great things yet to come. If you were to have your “Christmas and Glowsticks” album distributed to us say today (and if you were a VIP customer). I can certainly say that it would go live on iTunes (unless you would rather have it go live on a specific date like on Christmas Day) by this Friday.
As mentioned earlier, I believe that every approach is great because it offers more options to the artist which is what I would like to see. This is why we believe that the WaTunes Social Platform is great and practically essential for virtually every artist (whether they use WaTunes, CD Baby, TuneCore, Catapult, or ReverbNation). We give you the ability to embed ANY widget your heart desires on our site, post comments to other users, communicate and talk with each other via Skype, sync your iTunes Artist profile to your WaTunes profile via our very new Sync feature, Post your MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Blog, and Personal website links to your WaTunes profile. The best part is that you don’t have to use our digital distribution services to have a WaTunes profile!
Our goal is to provide you with options, alternatives, and make things much more cost effective and simple for you with little to no effort.
Q: “How hard is it to get on iTunes? How come WaTunes can do it for free? What’s the big mystery? Why do we need third parties? Why is this process not transparent?”
A: As mentioned earlier, having a direct deal with iTunes (or any store) can be extremely difficult if you have a small catalog due to that each store has maintenance cost (technical procedures, delivery process, upkeep, account maintenance, account management, etc.). Each store would rather work with labels and large distributors to minimize their cost and keep accounting more simple and effective for them.
One of the great and really cool reasons that we offer it for FREE is that our free iTunes model is complimentary with other services within the WaTunes core business model. Unlike the popular belief, the truth is that there is no cost for digital distributors to put up contents on iTunes and the like, the cost of each distributor comes from the labor and investment of each artist. Our formula has proved that we can work harder and better for less! Which makes it every more appealing to the end user for exploring WaTunes.
I hope I’ve answered some of your questions and if you have any other questions, please feel free to contact us. We’d love to hear from you Joel!
Kevin Rivers
CEO, WaTunes
info@watunes.com
Nicely done, Kevin. I was just walking back from an open-mic just now thinking that I bet nobody was going to answer my questions. This is really interesting information that I haven’t heard anywhere else. I wish WaTunes all the best.
Hi Joel,
Thank you for your kind words. If you have any other questions regarding WaTunes and/or the music industry, please shoot us a line. I wish you all the best in your music endeavors.
Kevin Rivers
CEO, WaTunes
info@watunes.com
[...] I must say that the discussion about digital distribution in the previous post is worth a look. There’s really interesting information that I haven’t seen anywhere [...]
Thank you for tale!
If you ran a business and you make the same money with every client–doesn’t matter if you’re galactically successful like Lady Gaga or a complete nobody like Joe Schmoe–then how do you grow your business? That’s right, by getting as MANY clients as possible. Because you get paid by charging them a yearly maintenance fee. Doesn’t matter if your clients have ZERO chance of selling. You want to make them feel like they should go with a company that does not take a percentage of your sales, but instead charges you an annual maintenance fee. And then you spend all your time scanning blogs and forums for anyone that mentions your company so you can give your BS spiel about how that company is right for you even though you have ZERO chance of selling anything.