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March 09, 2007
Apple's Music Marketing Muscleby David Harrell
Today's Wall Street Journal has a long piece on the marketing muscle of the iTunes store, which includes a sour note from Lily Allen:
Yet Ms. Allen, the young British singer behind the hit "Smile," complained during the recent radio interview about Apple's tactics. "They won't advertise your album unless you give them extra material," Ms. Allen said. She said iTunes pushed her to quickly turn out a version of a song, so she planned to give them a "rubbish remix." Ms. Allen said she would offer a better version free on her MySpace page. Apple declined to comment on Ms. Allen's remarks, and a spokeswoman for her label, EMI Group's Capitol Records, said the singer and her manager weren't available to elaborate.I'm curious about this stat from the article:
Apple isn't under as much pressure to squeeze profits from iTunes because of the money it makes on iPods. In fact, it earns little from iTunes after paying fees for the music and credit-card processing. ITunes typically pays major labels about 72 cents a track, while it pays most independent labels around 62 cents.Some iTunes sales from January just showed in our CD Baby account -- we're receiving 63.7 cents per individual track AFTER CD Baby takes its 9% cut. I can only guess that CD Baby was able to negotiate the "major label" rate for the self-released music it distributes.
But why the second-tier payout for indie labels that deal directly with Apple? Are the associated costs higher for selling lower-volume digital downloads?
tags: digital music iTunes Apple AAPL CD Baby
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The Layaways (my band)
New album: "The Space Between" is now available from eMusic.
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It's written as a how-to guide for those looking to become music supervisors, but I found it to be a good resource for musicians (like me) who are trying to get their music used in movies, TV, etc.