May162008
What Every Musician Should Know About Digital Distribution »
From Tunecore:
Part I: Distribution and Doing It Yourself
You can sell your music yourself right to your fans, on CDs you mail out of your home, from the trunk of your car, from a knapsack or on a collapsible table at your concerts or on a street corner. Direct selling has some real advantages—piracy is practically impossible, and as long as you track your inventory well, theft and even damage can be kept to a minimum. You keep all the money, other than your expenses. You can even decide who gets to be your customer.
…
A word about doing it yourself
Right now, millions of people are their own digital vendors, selling their music off their Websites, using PayPal or accepting checks in the mail and using file transfers to get the music to their fans case-by-case. That works if you have a few fans, but if you have hundreds, thousands or more, it gets expensive: your Website might not be able to handle the traffic, downloading and bandwidth costs could wipe out profits, as might the costs of credit card processing, etc.
Music Industry Gurus' Five Point Plan to Save their Business »
From the Listening Post:
…here are five recommendations for the music industry from The Leading Question and Music Ally:
1. Music needs to be bundled with other products and entertainment packages: Value can be created from many other ways than consumers simply buying the occasional download. Music needs to move away from per unit sales and become more of a service than a product. It should be pre-loaded into devices, bundled with mobile tariffs, offered as part of TV/Entertainment/ISP packages.
2. Labels needs to experiment with new release schedules and formats: The old model of single and album releases has run its course. Labels needs to be more innovative if they are not to be freezed out altogether. Look at the likes of Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails and Prince and experiment with new and varied formats, new pricing models and release schedules, digital only releases and promotional partnerships with brands.
3. Free doesn’t mean no money: The music industry should not fear free. It needs to embrace it. The culture of the net is free or at least feeling free. But money can still be made from other sources: everything from advertising supported services, to brands paying for an association with the artists to newspapers paying for giveaway CDs.
4. Change the charts: The Charts don’t make much sense anymore. Now that fewer and fewer people are buying music the charts need to reflect the other ways that people are consuming music.
5. Trust the DJ: Online means anyone can access or own John Peel’s entire record collection, but the instant and massive availability of music on demand means you need a trusted guide like John Peel more than ever. The new layers of value will come from the social connections that come about through music as much as from the music itself.
100 Essential Jazz Albums »
- 1. Miles Davis - Kind of Blue
- 2-100. Everything Else
Concurski.
That Guy Ben
Reblogged from this isn't happiness..
"After all, business exists in a kind of Nietzschean state beyond good and evil - it has to, because it’s only when we ditch the suffocating dictates of morality that we can think in terms of economically meaningful concepts, like utility, efficiency, and productivity.
Right? Wrong. The problem with failing to call evil, well, evil is simple: we can never really do good unless we’re able to judge what’s evil. And doing good is fast becoming a strategic - not just a moral - imperative.
"
Cover Stories, Old and New »
Khoi Vinh looks at album covers from early and late in various artists’ careers. Contains gems like his commentary on the cover of U2’s How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb:
Four aging rock ’n’ roll multi-millionaires who can’t even be bothered to stand up for their cover shoot? It’s a far cry from the urgent, direct and still riveting portrait that adorned their 1983 album “War.” Based on this, I expect the art for their next release will show them all napping, fully reclined in diamond-studded La-Z-Boy chairs.
Reblogged from whitneymcn on tumblr.