By John McGlasson
Digital music distribution is new to everyone, so we’re all learning as we go how to market it, manage it, and profit from it. Rarely does an entire industry get caught off guard the way the music biz was with the iPod and the immediate digital revolution. There are no experts, they’re being made as I write this, the people that are still around to talk about this transition two years from now will be the new experts.
For the sake of this article, I’m not discussing online cd sales, which is mail order, a whole different world from digital music sales, which is an exchange of digital files, there’s no product to manufacture or ship.
Right now digital music distribution is largely controlled by iTunes, 85% of online music purchases are made there. EMusic makes up around 7.5%, the remaining 7.5% is made up of Rhapsody and a handful of others.
The truth is that people who download music rarely buy the entire album, I can track this through our distributor, there are usually 2-3 songs per album that get 5-10 times as many downloads as the rest of the songs on the album, often it’s a song you’d expect to have the least downloads, there’s no explaining it. Sometimes the artist the label spends the least amount of time and money promoting has the highest number of downloads for the month, even more confusing. We also get a figure of whole album purchases, so there’s no mistaking the numbers, song downloads are 10-1 album downloads, often more.
As we learn how many people are downloading music on these various sites, and chart that against the sales of various releases in various genres, we can begin to break them down and determine how many people we’re actually targeting with each new release, and spend to promote accordingly. The more obscure the genre, the more difficult it is to find your audience in the endless sea of browsers. This is where it gets scary.
It’s almost always been the case that the music press is how people find out about new music. Ads alone aren’t enough, you have to have interviews, reviews, and articles written about you, lots of them, to make the big jump. How does someone with a great new album get it to their target audience without a budget for magazine ads and the publicist required to get the attention of the writers? I don’t see how it could be done without spending at least $20k for a new release, and there are no guarantees after you do spend the money. Right now, unless the artist has a name in their genre, labels aren’t going to be very willing to fork out $20k to promote them, no matter how great they may be, until the digital returns start to justify the spending.
So why spend countless hours recording an album that flows a certain way, that’s meant to be listened to as an album, only to have it chopped into digital bits for what amount to little bites of an entire meal, for which you get pennies per play? Do we refuse to sell single tracks? Do we price the album so cheap that it encourages the purchase of the entire album over just one or two tracks? And if we do that, doesn’t it reduce the promo budget accordingly?
I’m beginning to think the solution is an old one, EP’s. the indie world survived on them for years. My next article will be on the benefits and beauty of EP’s. I welcome suggestions, comments, etc. Please support independent music, find a great cd today and buy it! Thanks for reading!
John McGlasson is a life-long guitarist, producer, and founder of o.i.e. Records, Ltd., a musician-oriented independent record label based in central Illinois.
in clude guitar tabs stuff you used to get in albums i don't buy any music so i really don't know what's going on i don't listen to music mtv messed up selling music if there wasn't videos cds would sell
Posted by: william cook | December 11, 2006 at 11:47 AM
in clude guitar tabs stuff you used to get in albums i don't buy any music so i really don't know what's going on i don't listen to music mtv messed up selling music if there wasn't videos cds would sell
Posted by: william cook | December 11, 2006 at 11:47 AM