SoundGreen

Perhaps most importantly, Apple offers not just the downloading service but also the hardware for managing music collections.

Hmmm... Take 3 Billion songs, yes billion with a B! divide that by 100 million iPods sold over the last 5 years... and you get, are you ready for this... Drum roll please, 30 songs per iPod!!! Wow that is 6 songs per year?!?

WTF... if it was good news it would be worth commenting on! They have over 5M songs, which is less than 20% of what Napster had at its height 7 years ago!!! (Napster had over 25M songs in its database of songs at its height)

You have to wonder what the Big 4 (five at the time) were thinking when they turned down Shawn Fanning (aka Napster himself) and his $1B of money over four years (beginning in 2000)!

It would have been a better split than iTunes and they wouldn't have the vulture that is Steve Jobs! Don't hate me, hate the business! He is a vulture with a good mouse trap. In a few short years he took something that many people did not think twice about, portable storage, and turned it into a killer. Perhaps Steve took a page out of Microsoft's, aka we used to work for you, that is until we rendered you useless to 95% of the world, Bill Gates' book? And don't hate Bill. What has Jobs done with his money lately? Was it anything on the level of trying to eradicate illnesses in Africa that would already be solved if the illness effected white people in the USA?

Back to iTunes... Kudos on 3B songs and the 150MB of space on each 8Gig iPod you have sold. To me this indicates two things:

• Perhaps there is more truth than I thought regarding studies that show people only listen to new music until their mid 20s
  
• CD sales (or past CD sales) are still driving the sales of new technology (i.e. iPods or my favorite from 2 years ago Cowan iAudio X5 20GB with Voice Recorder)... OR people are still copying songs from the internet and borrowing music and copying it for themselves.

Makes me wonder about trying to give away over $1M to artists in two years!!!

• iTunes has given less than $700M in 5 years (and that is using a very conservative $0.25 per song goes to the artist).
• If you use a realistic $0.05 goes to the artist (on average), you calculate that iTunes has paid $150M to artists over 5 years while people other than the creators earned $2.8B!!!

Try to wrap your brain around that one.
And if you get tired of doing that, consider that it is estimated that Napster allowed the swapping/sharing of over 30B songs (10 times what iTunes has done in five years)

As has been contended by indie folks for years, the answer is not necessarily yes! It has long been our contention that iTunes typically benefits only singles, not album sales. Singles then get cut into so many slices that the amount paid to the artist is (at best) less than fifty cents.

In my words: the study shows that radio (i.e. singles you hear over and over until you don't want to listen to it any more) does not help album sales.

Read it for yourself here.

We are helping with the Play:STL Festival!

September 21-23. Bands from all over are asking to be in it, but it will be a large mix of local "Missouri/Illinois" talent.

Should be a blast. We are also hoping to launch a limited access version of the site by then.

SoundGreen, finally settled on a compensation structure we are pleased with. Should be a shocker to no one that we think current compensation is out of whack. We will begin to provide more details in the coming weeks.

No one who strives to make a living in "Art" appreciate it when one states you have to be good at sales. This is because of all the good things associated with Art compared with the bad associated with Sales.

Would you rather associate with an Artist or a Salesman? I guess it depends on what you need at the time... entertainment or a deal.

But why do you hear about Fallout Boy and not Wide Awake? Some would say it is talent, showmanship, song writing. But the real answer is perhaps an "unspoken"... Management and Resources. ???What you ask...

I would challenge anyone to listen to a Wide Awake album and say that Fallout Boy is better! It is not fair... no offense to FOB or whatever acronym their management pushes...

Anyway... we are hoping to help bands such as Wide Awake and The Meanwhiles create art that fans and consumers like. More on the differences between fans and consumers later...

fans are leaders, consumers tend to be followers

Good short film about Net Neutrality... and "NO" I don't think Al Gore invented the Internet.

So… long time no talk?!?

I have:

1. Moved to St Louis
   
2. Continued to work with great programmers
   
3. Talked on and off with Laura, owner of PlaybackSTL
   
4. Begun a new job, second job to this… but it pays the bills
   
5. Got married to a fabulous woman

Back to a little thing called copyrights… What the hell is Google talking about??? They are breaking the Supreme Court decision in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer v. Grokster. Like it or not, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of MGM saying Grokster was not protected under Sony v Universal Studios (which allowed Sony to continue to produce Betamax). Side note, Betamax
was not the ultimate winner (JVC was with VCR). Grokster was
making a profit from advertising while allowing free access to pirated
intellectual property (songs, movies, et cetera).

So… what is different now? I’ll tell you… Google paid $1.65 Billion for YouTube and needs to make their money back on adwords and other annoying ads that pop-up all over YouTube. (really they didn’t pay, they diluted their company to acquire YouTube,
but that is a separate topic all together)

Sour grapes? No! Google has more money and better attorneys (or at least they can hire better attorneys) than any property rights holder who sues them. This is why so many have “reached deals” with Google.

Bottom line: YouTube is a powerful new media for dissemination of videos, which if harnessed properly can lead to future or increased profits for artists. As long as there are AdWords or other revenues being generated through YouTube, Google is in direct violation of US law. They purchased YouTube with the intent to break the law.

Just a few thoughts to charge the blog back up. The author does realize Blogger is owned by Google, and doesn't care.

Okay, so perhaps an artist couldn’t sell 200,000 albums with us… point taken… but we do think that getting the artist on tour for 90 shows a year (minimum) could help them sell at least 5,000 subscriptions.  

Subscriptions?  I thought you were talking about albums!  We are, to us it is the same… a subscription is better for the fan – they can download, burn, whatever they want to whatever content we have (just please limit the passing on to 3 friends & let them know where you got it and what a good deal it was for the artist).

Okay… so 5,000 subscriptions + our non-recoupable costs we give to the artist through direct tour support, equipment, marketing + partial transportation reimbursement (gas is expensive) + other perks…

An artist would get approximately (using ‘aprox’ because can’t really tell to the penny without taking hours to calculate every last detail)… ready for this… $85,000.  

I know you want to know what we make on that… well… not too complicated… our gross revenue is approximately $140,000…

So there you have it… you can get 1.3% and a guaranteed short career OR you can earn 60% and grow your career until you are ready for the big leagues.

We have been looking for an interesting diagram that shows how much an artist makes with a traditional record label contract. The premise is the artist sells 200,000 albums at $17 each. The artist/group receives roughly $45,500 from the sale of the albums.

Who else gets a chunk of the $3.4 million gross sales?

• Best Buy, Wal-Mart, Amazon (retailer) – $1.275 million (37.5%)
• Distributor (owned by record label, if major) – $340,000 (10.0%)
• Record Label’s portion
• Manufacturing – $150,000 (4.4%)
• Marketing – $600,000 (17.6%)
• Additional – $528,000 (15.5%)
• Mechanicals (split between songwriter & publisher) – $160,000 (4.7%)
• Artist – $344,000 (10.1%)

So why does the artist only get $45,000 when you show $344,000 in the calculation. Oh, we forgot to tell you that there are ‘recoupable costs’ of approximately $250,000; Managers need their money too (15% of what the Artist’s net); business manager commission of 5% of the Artist’s net.

Wow… someone created something in this hypothetical situation that the consumer was willing to pay $3,400,000 for… and they only got to keep 1.3% of it… one word – AWESOME!!! Awesome if you are a label, or marketer, or retailer, or maybe even a business manager. But is sucks if you are an artist.


The full article from which this chart and figures is based can be found at Performing Songwriter.

Why pay the artist? Hmmm… we feel that the bearer of the majority of the benefits should be the one who created the art (‘Intellectual Property’)… simple… right or wrong???

Well, we are working on developing our website currently and hopefully should have a Beta version when we go to Colorado for the

Well, we are working on developing our website currently and hopefully should have a Beta version when we go to Colorado for the South Park Music Festival.

Sorry for the lack of updates, not that many are looking. We will be getting some diagrams up in the coming weeks and hopefully a few surveys.

Hugs, kisses and whatnot…