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’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

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.

–Peter
peter@tunecore.com