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Digital Audio Insider is David Harrell's blog about the economics of music and other digital content. I write from the perspective of a musican who has self-released four albums with the indie rock band the Layaways.

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November 23, 2011

TuneCore Releases Some Fascinating Sales Numbers
by David Harrell

To combat the blog meme that "artists not signed to major labels do not sell music or make money," TuneCore posted a fascinating document on its blog -- a July 2011 sales spreadsheet for all of the TuneCore-distributed artists who earned more than $100 in digital music royalties for the month.

Clearly, some TuneCore-distributed artists have a lot to be thankful for tomorrow -- 60 of them had digital royalties of more than $10,000 for the month, with three of them breaking into six-figure territory:

TuneCore sales chart

A couple of thoughts:

1. Some non-major label artists are obviously selling a lot of music. Yet there's a wide range of "self-released" artists in the TuneCore catalog, ranging from folks who are recording themselves in their bedrooms using Garageband to ex-major label artists with serious management teams and backing. It's certainly possible that some of that former group is among those at the top of the list above, but I'd bet it skews toward the latter group.

2. TuneCore has approximately 600,000 artist accounts and just 5,938 made the $100 cutoff point for the spreadsheet, meaning that less than 1% of TuneCore artists earned more than $100 in digital royalties for the month. That's not surprising, given that the average TuneCore client earns $179 a year in digital music royalties.

That's not an indictment of TuneCore, but it's another example of something that applies to musicians on labels of any size, as well as those who are truly independent: While relatively few of them are successful when it comes to music sales, those who are can do quite well.

Labels: music sales, TuneCore

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