Musicadium Blog

In the past few days there has been a lot of talk about chartfixer.com and their system to (possibly) get your single into the ARIA charts via having people download your song a set number of times.  We feel that it is our responsibility to clear up a few fallacies about this sort of practice and break down a few facts about what your money is really buying.

According to their website, you can be a musician or a downloader.

A musician being an independent artist or label who has their nominated single in iTunes already and wants to have it chart.

A downloader being anyone who registers.  They are then paid to download your song and they profit as well.  They are paid $3 AUD for $1.69 AUD download in iTunes.

Let’s take the Top 20 Package as an example - for $30000, you will receive 5000 downloads of your single at $1.69 AUD = $8450.
5000 downloads at $3.00 (including fees to pay downloaders) = $15000

Which means you are giving chartfixer.org $15000 for nothing (oh yes, they probably have costs too, such as staff verifying the download etc - but $15000?).

Even using Musicadium as your distributer of your single, where you receive 100% of what the outlet returns to us, you will receive $5000 of your money back, but this is basically spending $25000 of your money on “instant fame” as they claim.

BUT every independent artist should know this - there is no such thing as “instant fame” that will last or have any longevity.  A long-lasting career in the music industry requires planning, infrastructure, money, a support team, resources and long-term endurance and ambition.

Even if you choose to (unwisely) spend this money on chartfixer, you have to realise that getting into the charts with a single requires knowledge, common sense, managerial skills, organisation and strategy on how to capitalise on the chart position.  You will need to tour in support of the single.  You will need to have followup singles prepared and ready to go.  You will need a film clip to support the single, being played on Video Hits, Rage etc, you will need promotional materials, you will need money for advertising and marketing for your tour and so people continue to buy the single.  You will need support staff such as a manager and a booking agent.  Thing is, if you spend this money and pop up out of nowhere, chances are, you are going to stay a “small fish” and people like booking agencies will still not want to take your calls.  These are ongoing relationships and networks that need to be grown.

Do not be fooled into thinking that you can buy your way to anything but disappointment with this website and deal.  We at Musicadium are always endeavouring to give you access to knowledge and resources that allow you to have a long-term career in the new music industry.

With Digital Love,

The Musicadium Team

Musicadium has partnered with Valleyarm to add 100s of new outlets for you to distribute to. Have your music sold in heaps of new digital stores including Spotify, Guvera and Bigpond!

• You’re already on iTunes and perhaps, AmazonMP3, eMusic and Nokia
• There’s 100s of digital stores out there selling music to fans like yours every day
• And artists just like you are bringing in extra revenue from these new, exciting stores
• You can be part of that action too and Musicadium is here to help!

Expose and sell your music to massive new audiences throughout Australia, Asia, Pacific, US, UK, Europe etc in heaps of new stores including …

Spotify, BigPond, Optus, Virgin, Vodafone and Guvera!

There’s no need to pay $39 for every new outlet we bring on board. Simply get them all in one hit! For a limited time, have Musicadium place your release in 100s of new stores around the globe for a once off fee of $100 AUD (ex GST).

Note: after June 25 you can still purchase this distribution offer but it will be around twice the price!

Of course you’ll still be covered by our friendly, flexible distribution agreement meaning…

• we pass on all the royalties we receive to you
• no lock in term contracts
• non-exclusive
• you choose what regions, outlets, genres etc you wish to be in.

With the 100s for 100 promo, get…

• Your release added to stores such as Spotify, BigPond, Optus, Virgin, Vodafone and Guvera and hundreds more new outlets over the next couple of months
• Your release placed in all new stores we continue to bring on board (100s more coming)
• 24×7 access to sales royalty reports and royalty collections in the Musicadium members area
• Option to select the territories and genres to distribute to

And until 25 June 2010 receive all this for…

• $179 $100 AUD excluding GST once only distribution fee which covers all deliveries to all new stores and to those stores we keep adding
• Pay on-line with a credit card or using your PayPal account (happy to accept other payment options too)

For every new store we bring on board, your music will be included in those stores. The more stores we bring on board, the more value your $100 buys!

What do I do next?

The brilliance of this offer is in its simplicity…

• As a Musicadium customer, simply login to your account, edit the outlets for each of your releases, make the once off distribution payment and we’ll take care of the rest!
• For new Musicadium customers, simply create an account, then add your release, make the once off distribution payment and let Musicadium take care of the rest!

Extra Special Bonus for a limited time…

If you purchase within the next seven days (ie by next Thursday 10 June 2010) you’ll also receive:

• Your chosen track included on our brand new compilation album specific to your genre
• The compilation album exclusively promoted and sold through iTunes starting this July
• Valued at $55 but yours free if you purchase before 10 June 2010!

We look forward to getting your music even further out into the world!

Digitally Yours,

The Musicadium team

PS Every existing Musicadium customer taking up this offer also receives a special gift just for being a valued Musicadium family member. Our team has chosen something especially for you!

PPS Maybe you also want to pick up the gaps in your current distribution beyond the original four Musicadium outlets (iTunes, eMusic, Amazon, Nokia). Dring this 100s for 100 promo, you can add your release to those selected stores for only $9.75 AUD ex GST for each outlet.

PPPS Not yet a Musicadium customer or perhaps you’re an existing customer and want to add another release, then we also have a special offer of $139 AUD ex GST to distribute to all four original Musicadium outlets ( iTunes, eMusic, Amazon, Nokia) PLUS to all the new stores including Spotify, Bigpond etc. Just create an account or login and select those outlet options.

Click here to add 100s of new outlets for $100

PART 1

PART 2

PART 3

PART 4

PART 5

As far as I can see, the power in the music industry shifted along with the advent of digital music and (digital) distribution became possible for everyone.

Great, right?

Absolutely.  What it does mean is that it has created a generation of musos who are doing everything for themselves and are more skilled, knowledgable and educated on how to self-manage, distribute, book and hold the power and rights for their band, where traditionally a label and management have done everything for the band and kept them at arm’s length of the business side of the industry. There’s a good and bad point to the old arrangement.  Good that the artists get time to be artists (i.e.creative) and bad, that they don’t see what’s going on and very quickly lose control and knowledge about what is going on in their own band (and often money that is rightfully theirs.) Remembering that knowledge is power, that’s a bad position for bands to be in.

Somewhere along the way, an imbalance happened and musicians became expected to do and know it all themselves ALL the time.  It seems to me that there is a middle “working class” of bands, who lose out both ways. They are expected to create amazing music as well as do all of the management tasks, book the band’s tours, manage all the promotion and publicity, be the graphic designer, get the album/EP distributed, document all sales, co-ordinate studio time and much more.

Solution? Well, that’s where the music industry shift has been great too.  As it turns out, the shift in power in the music industry has given rise to an entrepreneurial spirit and industry workers are now drilling down on specific elements in the music industry and working as consultants or contractors to combat the loss in numbers of 9-5 jobs in the music industry. This means that there are a lot of opportunities for bands to work on a non-exclusive, one-off/periodical basis with industry workers, with possibilities for creating long-lasting relationships.

It seems to me that the best way for an artist to multi-task, once they hit a certain level (most likely when the band has too much on their plate business-wise and hopefully enough money to pay) is to start building a team around them who can be delegated tasks.  A trusted group of skilled individuals/businesses who can be called upon and hopefully paid when tasks need to be achieved. It’s exactly why non-exclusive, fee-for-service, no lock-in, term based contract services where artists/labels hold all the rights are the most viable and lucrative to artists (long-term career wise) at this point in time.

The band or the manager can now be the label, negotiating distribution deals, while hiring publicists and a plugger for radio, as well as working in conjunction with someone to gain sync opportunities.

The biggest question to ask is: What does the band need to do themselves and what can be delegated and paid for?

Who do you want on your team?

Remember the so called ‘good old days’, when bands just made money from CD sales, touring and merchandise? ‘Selling out’ or making money from a corporate tie in, or through having a song featured in  a mainstream movie was deemed a pretty negative thing. Things have since  changed, and with the decrease in record sales and the recent havoc within the music industry, artists are looking for new and interesting ways  to get their music heard.

One way of doing this is by selling their music to be synchronized with commercials and hit television programs. Synchronization gives artists the  opportunity to have their music played during a commercial or a television series. This not only creates a hefty wad of cash, but generates a huge amount of exposure and awareness.

On a local scale, take the Mitsubishi Lancer ad with Polka, by Yves Klein Blue playing. You know the one - the couple are throwing stuff into the back of their car, and the song makes the ad great. Or if you want to look at it from a bigger scale, there are television shows, Gossip Girl or Entourage to name a few, who only want the latest and greatest music featured, Entourage has featured music from Cold War Kids, Phoenix and even our very own Empire of The Sun.

The exposure and recognition that is gained from your song is uncharted as it could be played across all television stations on     
free-to-air, dozens of stations on Foxtel and Austar, at prime time to millions of people. Even if it is only a snippet of a song, it is helping to reach an audience outside your target market that you wouldn’t have thought of before. Having a song synced with a commercial could help to also generate numerous purchases. With the use of iPhone apps such as Shazam, a consumer can hear the song on an ad, Shazam it, and have the opportunity to purchase it via iTunes immediately.

The new hit show Glee is a great example of synchronization at its best. Glee has sold over 2 million tracks on iTunes, and its success doesn’t look like it is going to slow down. The cast also cover popular songs, and this is helping to boost sales by artists who manage to get selected for the show – an example of this being Rihanna’s “Take A Bow” increasing a massive 189% since it was covered on Glee. The royalties that they are generating for older artists is also incredible, the Glee Cast covered Journeys “Don’t Stop Believin” and it was certified Gold in December selling 500,000 copies. See the article here.

In theory, sync is great but is anybody really paying that much attention?  Sure you hear a great song in a movie, you might go buy the soundtrack, or find it through other sources via the Internet once you’ve identified it on Shazam. One good song on Gossip Girl may give you a kick start, but the rest, a great live show, other great tracks, still needs to be present in order be successful. Otherwise an artist may fall into the abyss of songs that are only associated with the ads they were on, and become known as “Oh yeah, the song off that dog food ad” forever.

With not a whole lot of ads being created, and so many artists trying to get heard, the chance of ending up on an ad are slim, to none. But still, if this could be harnessed, and Australian commercials used music by Australian bands, then the world would be better place.

Take from this blog what you will. At the end of the day what works for some people won’t always work for others. The old model of selling albums to make money is changing along with culture. Artists need new ways to get their music heard, and if that means writing a song for a vampire soundtrack, is that still selling out, or simply surviving?

Attribution for photographs

Yesterday, Hundreds of Thousands of Australians tuned into Triple J to count down the Hottest 100 tracks of 2009.

news.com.au dissected the countdown and come up with the following interesting facts:

• 50 of the Hottest 100 artists were from indie labels, 44 from major record labels and 6 were unsigned.
• Only 27 of the Hottest 100 songs featured in the 2009 ARIA Top 100 singles chart
• 36 of the songs were from Australian artists, 29 from the UK, 23 from the United States.
• Mumford & Sons Hottest 100 #1 song, Little Lion Man, featured at just #87 on the 2009 ARIA Top 100 singles chart
• Not one of the Top 40 songs on the 2009 ARIA Top 100 singles chart featured on Triple J’s list.
• The first to make the cut was Hilltop Hoods Chase That Feeling, at #3 on the Hottest 100, #42 on the 2009 ARIA Top 100 singles chart
• Florence and the Machine and Muse charted the most number of times in Triple J’s Hottest 100, with 4 each, Temper Trap and Flight of The Conchords notched up 3
• Lisa Mitchell was the first Idol artist to ever feature in the Hottest 100 annual poll, charting at #7 with Coin Laundry

Some fun Musicadium-related Facts about the Hottest 100

• One of the 6 unsigned acts, Musicadium Artist Seth Sentry was one of them!
• 12 of the tracks in the 100 were by Artists who Musicadium has distributed (though not necessarily the tracks featured in the hottest 100) - Lisa Mitchell, The Temper Trap, Seth Sentry, Sarah Blasko, The Hilltop Hoods, Philadelphia Grand Jury, The Middle East and Washington.
• Flying in the face of the Hottest 100 of all Time poll, half of those 12 tracks were by female artists or contained female artists on vocals.
• Seth Sentry was one of a number of artists in the 100 who were Unearthed artists

Ahh, the holiday period. A time for family, food, festivity and fantastic tunes.

Our gift to you is Digital Distribution of your music and video - which you can re-gift to your fans!

Last week, we promised you a sale on our Digital Distribution services and in a fit of pre-Christmas excitement, we gave away gift cards like crazy to those who took up on our offer.

This week, we’re delivering more gifts to you like some sort of Rock and Roll Santa Claus!

FOR A LIMITED TIME ONLY- OFFER AVAILABLE TILL 5:00PM AEST 18th DECEMBER 2009!!*

Video Distribution
Add 3 videos for the price of 2
1 or 2 videos, get a $20.00 AUD iTunes Gift card

E-Mail info@musicadium.com for instructions on how to sign your videos up and for specifications for encoding.

Add an Outlet
Add Nokia or additional outlets for $20.00 AUD each for releases already through Musicadium

New Releases
- All four outlets for the price of three for new releases - $19.75 AUD per outlet!

Don’t forget to email info@musicadium.com to let us know you signed the release up - you can expect to receive an invoice for the limited time offer price within 48 hours.

Issues

If you are having any issues with the uploading of WAV files to the Musicadium system, be sure to e-mail support@musicadium.com for assistance.

At just about every conference or industry forum we attend, invariably someone will ask about “What’s the next big thing in music? What’s the future of music? How will bands be making money in 5 years, 10 years?”

Invariably, the answer is “horses for courses.” Which is kind of vague and annoying for conference-goers because that rhetoric then gets bandied around a lot.  But when you think about it, is very open. Which is nice. Because it means that you, as an artist or artist manager, have options.  Where previously, there was but one definition of success.  You were signed to a major label, big advances, massive tours, mass-media campaigns and stadium shows and platinum records, all the while being disconnected with your fans.

I don’t think that there will ever be a culture of the super-mega-massive-superstar ever again. Career artists, sure, big shows and festival headliners, sure, but certainly they and their labels will need to be thinking innovatively and being ahead of the game to survive.  They will need to be connecting with fans as well and certainly not being inaccessible as before.  There may be big success for a time, but being ignorant of connecting with fans through live performance and technology could so very easily push them away.

Luckily, in this new environment, it kind of comes down to something that Seth Godin was talking about on his blog a few weeks ago - making decisions. There are endless options in terms of distribution of your music, touring, marketing, publishing & licensing, the whole gamut of industry options.  By being a decision maker, you set yourself goals and you define who you will be and what you will and won’t do in your career.  There is no one path anymore, so making decisions about how you feel about certain paths/options will take you on your own choose-your-own-adventure music industry tale.

You can literally decide what levels of success you wish to achieve and how you can create your success, whatever that is for you. That’s not to say that an artist should not understand the current models within the industry, but decide to work within them, around them or invent new ones.

You can decide how to record your music, you can do it yourself at home or you can record at a studio, you can choose to give it away on a disc or sell it at whatever price point you want, you can choose to give it away online or sell it in whatever stores you choose or a webstore of your own, you can choose to have merchandise or make merchandise and sell it in webstores who can print-on-demand at no cost to you,  you can set up your own digital label and distribute not only yourself, but other bands you like as well, using a digital aggregator like Musicadium. You can decide how much you spend on marketing, if any budget at all.  You can choose how to access your fans and the level of interaction you have with them.

There are literally as many answers to the question of “What the future for musicians and artists?” as there are people in the world.  It is open to interpretation.

The next big thing in Music? Could be you. Make the decision to make decisions.

I recently designed some flyers for the UnPlug Live concept I had devised several weeks back. Last week I got my designs printed @ StreetPrint in Birmingham, (posters to follow soon).

I’ll be distributing these everywhere I go; at local shows, venues, record shops, recording studios, ticket outlets, clothes stores, universities, colleges, fast food joints…everywhere!

Since displaying the flyers outside the venue the other day, a good number of bands are already showing interest in playing at UnPlug, finding the policy I have specified for each show most appealing. This of course benefits the exposure of Musicadium, potentially increasing the level of UK artists registering for digital distribution.

Digital copies of these flyers are circulating across Myspace, Facebook and other social networking sites, with various Birmingham bloggers also due to be contacted.

Here’s a clearer example (click to enlarge)

Front:

Back:

Advance tickets for each show look a little something like this:

I’ve been meeting up with artists scheduled to play at the venue, discussing the idea of UnPlug Live and the benefits of registering with Musicadium. The fact that bands retain 100% royalties and have no term based contracts hanging over their heads, proves to be the most appealing factor when informing exactly how the distribution deal works. The cool thing is that this policy I have devised at UnPlug will also remain on-going, even after my internship is complete and I have moved to Australia. Providing the nights are successful, the events will continue, therefore creating a solid connection with Musicadium and UnPlug in the UK.

I’m also mapping out ideas for the Musicadium podcast I mentioned in one of my previous posts. For every artist registered through the Unplug Live concept, I then wish to devise a podcast featuring tracks from bands who have performed at UnPlug. This will be a first and awesome feature for the company, another incentive for artists wishing to get their music heard.

I’m also going to represent Musicadium with my upcoming DJ bookings, by having the Musicadium logo alongside my name on all future flyer designs. Every little bit helps!

Ok I could really do with some tea and pudding right now…I’ll keep you all updated with more news soon!

Peace

Jimbooo

jamesb@musicadium.com

Artist Liaison and UK Correspondent

Musicadium family member Roxy Burt aka Jane Doe has been very industrious of late, DJing at the latest Musicadium showcase and at various venues around Brisbane.  Her new endeavour is the combination of fashion, art, music and industry. Just check out the Press release for her event this Saturday October 17th at Brisbane’s X&Y Bar.

The recent explosion of club nights has been a gift and a curse to Brisbane, Australia. Beggars have been made choosers with the weekly tirade of events. What was once the highlight of your month now has to settle for a nonchalant “maybe attending” on Facebook.

glassghost, however, is one night you don’t want to miss. A jam-packed feast of disco delinquencies for you to sink your fangs into, the madness begins at X&Y Bar on Saturday the 17th of October. A product of the masterminds that brought you Turpentine and Pistol Whipped, the two have teamed up like crazed scientists to create the Frankenstein’s monster of all club nights. Cue flash of lightning!

Inheriting Turpentine’s lust for emerging fashion labels, glassghost is set to feature some of Brisbane’s newest and most exciting designers, while Pistol Whipped sews it all together with Brisbane’s freshest offerings- DJ’s Jane Doe, Aukistra and Frankie Trouble bringing their distinctive indie electro buzz.

The night takes on a life of its own through an electric live performance by The Cityscape Riot, playing tunes off their debut EP, Technodome Nights. Already a Triple J feature artist in November 2007, the band are a heady duo that sounds like a mutant Daft Punk fronted by Ian Curtis.

Adding extra industry value to the night, glassghost is backed by digital music aggregator, Musicadium, who will be present on the night to talk to musicians and labels in attendance about DIY, 100% royalty-return Digital Distribution of their music and/or video to iTunes and a host of other online outlets.

If that still hasn’t got your heart racing, there will be zines by Bats and Turpentine to pick up, as well as live art by Coco, Sarah Field and Rhiannon Mallet. Oh, and did we mention that entry is FREE? Phew, BREATH!

So get your good self along to X&Y Bar (Free Entry) on Saturday the 17th October for glassghost!

Sarah and a crack team of interns will be on hand to dispense advice on distribution, promotion and connection.

RSVP TO THE EVENT ON FACEBOOK!