David Byrne On SpiralFrog
From davidbyrne.com...
9.7.06: The Empire Fights Back
A new music download site has made deals with two of the largest music catalogues in the world — potentially, then, they could become a challenge to iTunes. But the model is way different.
From The Guardian UK:
The deal follows SpiralFrog's agreement with Universal Music Group announced last week and means the site can offer users free legal downloads from artists such as James Blunt, Kelly Clarkson and this week's Mercury Prize winners, Arctic Monkeys.All well and good if you want stuff these major labels have signed and approved of — to me it implies that if you’re not an artist with one of these majors then you might have trouble getting your track available on these sites in the first place, and even then, if your stuff isn’t hot, the advertiser who is paying you will eventually balk at funding fringe stuff that doesn’t draw (the right) consumers to their products. The advertiser holds the purse strings, and will naturally pull the other strings too, despite what they may claim, so this model puts the control of what music is available back in the hands of the majors and their corporate cronies.While iTunes charges for music — 79p a track in Britain — on SpiralFrog users will have to watch a short advert before they can download a song free.
As far as artists are concerned, it is understood they will get royalties based on how many times songs are downloaded, with the money coming from SpiralFrog's advertising revenue.
Not that iTunes is fair and balanced, either. I don’t know the details, but I have heard that they are like record stores of yore — doling out position (visibility) to a very very limited number of artists. No surprise there — there is limited space. I’ve also heard that true indie artists get inferior treatment — lower royalty rates (or higher entry costs), less attention, and sometimes they are refused entry outright. Who’s manning the velvet rope here? What happened to that Long Tail where everything is available?
Read the rest of David's post here.
Posted at 10:06 AM
Tags: David Byrne
anyone with a record can distribute it via iTunes and several other digital outlets through www.tunecore.com. it's inexpensive and the royalties are absolutely fair.
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ark is correct about tunecore. I'm very satisfied with it. Spiral Frog is just the beginning of this long tail thing. The labels are still hanging on for control, but this is a good sign.
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While iTunes may give priority to the majors in terms of "featured work" on their main page, I've always been very impressed with the variety of indie music I've found on the store. Just recently, Ryan (of Catbirdseat) was able to put his latest release from Catbird Records, Tap Tap's "Lanzafame," up for sale on iTunes.
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it has been said here before, and will be again: emusic.com takes the prize...
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