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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.
My personal website has links to my LinkedIn and Google+ pages and you can send e-mail to david [at] thelayaways [dot] com.
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May 19, 2011
A Flat Fee or Commissions for Digital Music Distribution is an Economic Decision, Not a Moral Dilemma: TuneCore vs. CD Babyby David Harrell
I've been meaning to post a detailed CD Baby vs. TuneCore comparison for several years now and thought that last week's changes at TuneCore (a bunch of new features, accompanied by a hefty price increase for the annual maintenance fee) would motivate me to start writing. But what finally got me going was TuneCore C.E.O. Jeff Price's comments about the ethics of charging commissions. His desire to defend his company and its business model is understandable, but I don't think we need to frame the flat fee vs. commissions question as a moral argument.
Overlapping, Not Identical
As a self-released musician, I've used both CD Baby and TuneCore for distributing my music and -- for the most part -- I'm very satisfied with both services. I realized long ago that the best way to make money in the music industry is to sell stuff to aspiring musicians, many of whom will spend every cent they make from gigs, music sales, and their day jobs to support their dreams of a music career. In a world of scammers and rip-offs, both CD Baby and TuneCore provide a valuable service -- instant worldwide distribution for virtually any musician, something that was unthinkable 15 years ago. Both do so for reasonable fees and both firms have good reputations.
A direct comparison of the two companies is difficult, as their distribution services overlap somewhat, but they're certainly not identical. CD Baby began as online seller of physical CDs and later expanded to digital distribution, TuneCore was a digital distributor from the get-go. With TuneCore's recent enhancements, it currently provides more features on the digital end, while CD Baby will sell your CD through its online store and, via a deal with Super D distribution, allows people to order your CD from almost any record store.
The business models differ as well: CD Baby charges a one-time set-up fee and a 9% commission on digital sales, TuneCore doesn't charge commissions on digital sales but you'll pay an annual maintenance fee in addition to the initial set-up charge. Please note: I'm limiting this post to a discussion of CD Baby and TuneCore, the two services I've actually used. There are other alternatives, of course, but that's for a later post!
Running the Numbers
With the caveat that the services aren't identical, let's assume that digital distribution itself is basically a commodity service. That is, once your music is available within the catalogs of iTunes, Amazon MP3, eMusic, and other digital retailers and subscription services, there's no real difference between the distribution providers. If you don't need/want the extra bells and whistles that TuneCore provides, nor CD Baby's distribution of physical CDs, it simply comes down to how much you end up paying for digital distribution. (That's assuming, of course, that you trust the distributor to make timely, accurate royalty payments and to stay in business. I have no worries with either CD Baby or TuneCore.)
For the first year, no math is necessary -- because the initial set-up charges are virtually identical, you'll come out ahead with TuneCore. While CD Baby's album set-up fee is just $39, that amount doesn't include a UPC bar code. CD Baby charges $20 for a bar code, but you can easily purchase one on your own for $10, giving you a total cost of $49, which basically matches the $49.99 initial fee with TuneCore. No matter what your total digital sales are for the first year of a release, you'll pocket more with TuneCore, as you'll pay no commission on those sales.
After the first year, you have to determine if 9% of your ongoing annual royalties from the digital sales of an individual album will exceed TuneCore's annual maintenance fee. (Keep in mind that the iTunes payout for a 99-cent download is 70 cents.) Before TuneCore's price change, the crossover point was $222 in digital royalties, which represents approximately $317 in total digital sales. That's about 320 99-cent individual song downloads, 32 $9.99 digital albums sales, or some combination of the two.
With TuneCore's new annual maintenance fee of $49.99, the crossover point jumps to $555.44 of digital royalties, or approximately $794 in total digital sales for the album. That translates into 802 99-cent downloads or 80 digital albums. If you don't sell that much for an individual release, you're better off paying the 9% CD Baby commission. In fairness to TuneCore, you can turn the math around to calculate how much extra you might end up paying with a commission model. For example, if you manage to sell 5,000 99-cent downloads each year, you'll generate $3,500 in digital royalties and pay $315 in commissions to CD Baby, more than six times the annual TuneCore maintenance fee. (TuneCore also claims that some of its clients were already spending $65 to $70 per release each after paying for additional services such as tracking reports, and that the new all-inclusive fee will actually represent a price decrease for these clients.)
But the real question here is which outcome is more likely for most self-released musicians -- a few hundred dollars in digital sales per album each year or a few thousand? You could make the argument that a serious musician with any sort of talent could/should move enough units to exceed the crossover points above. And in the wake of last week's news about the pricing changes at TuneCore, there were plenty of Twitter and message board posts along the lines of "if you can't sell $50 of downloads then you shouldn't be releasing music." Yet the sales threshold isn't $50 in music sales a year -- it's selling enough digital downloads, each and every year (in a world where CD sales still dominate), to justify an ongoing annual maintenance fee instead of a small commission on each sale.
I hate to say it, but for the vast majority of self-released musicians, that seems unlikely. In a post from three years ago, I highlighted the example of an indie rock band that released a strong album, one that got a great response from both college radio and the music press, including:
Pitchfork love -- an 8.0 out of 10And this wasn't a self-released/financed album -- it was backed by the promotional muscle (new media, retail, and radio) and tour support of a well-known indie label with solid distribution. Yet it sold just a little over 5,000 total units. That album was released in 2004 and I doubt it has sold enough digital copies in the subsequent years to make the TuneCore model more attractive than the commission approach.
Strong support and airplay from KEXP -- one of the biggest/best known CMJ-reporting stations
Listed in "Top 10 Bands You Haven't Heard of" for the year by Rolling Stone magazine
Magnet Magazine's #3 record of the year
That's just one cherry-picked example, however, and you could just as easily point to dozens of TuneCore-distributed artists who would've paid significantly more for digital distribution under a commission-based model. Indeed, for the bigger-name acts featured on TuneCore's homepage -- acts like Cheap Trick, Joan Jett, Public Enemy, and Moby -- the decision to go with TuneCore was likely a no-brainer.
But new acts or those without established fan bases can't be sure they're going to sell. Here's what the founder of one well-respected indie label, spinART records, recently said about music sales:
I believed in every single of the 230+ releases and artists I signed and released. I did not think for a second that any of them would not sell. But the reality is, most did not take off, my label had the same hit to miss ratio as all other indie labels. Yes, we released successes like The Pixies, Apples In Stereo, The Dears and Clem Snide, but we also released The Technical Jed, Apollo Sunshine, Kaito, Head Of Femur and many others that, sadly, despite all of our marketing efforts, very few people bought.The label owner? TuneCore founder Jeff Price!
While you never know what's going to happen with any individual release, it appears that the typical self-released artist doesn't fare well under the TuneCore model. As recently calculated by Digital Music News, the average TuneCore client earns just $179 in digital royalties each year, and that's on a per-client basis, not $179 for each album. Any artist/small label earning this amount is obviously better off with the commission model, even before TuneCore's price increase.
However, if you get lucky and have a "hit" with a self-released album, you'll pay far more in commissions to CD Baby than you would with TuneCore's set annual fee. The worst-case scenario with the TuneCore model is that you'll pay more in annual fees than with a commission model, but you're only out fifty bucks a year at most. But if you sell tens of thousands of digital downloads with CD Baby, it will cost you thousands of dollars in commissions. Yet it's a risk that you can easily hedge against.
The Best of Both Worlds
CD Baby or TuneCore isn't necessarily an either/or question -- you can use both services together to maximize your income from digital sales in the first year and eliminate ongoing maintenance fees. If I were releasing a new album both on CD and as a digital download, touring to support it, and conducting a college radio campaign, I'd probably use TuneCore for digital distribution (at least for the first year) and CD Baby for online CD sales and inclusion in the Super D distribution catalog. After the first year or two, if the total digital sales of the album were below the crossover thresholds listed above, I'd ask TuneCore to pull the album from the digital stores and initiate digital distribution with CD Baby. (Because the album would already be in the CD Baby system, you wouldn't have to pay the $39 fee again.)
The downside to this approach is that you'd have a period of at least several weeks when the album wouldn't be available in digital stores, and you'd likely lose any customer ratings and reviews in each store. For that reason, I think RouteNote is an intriguing alternative -- it's a digital distributor that gives you the choice of a $30 annual maintenance fee or "free" distribution with a 15% commission on sales, and allows you to switch between the two pricing structures, based on your subsequent sales. I'd love to see CD Baby and TuneCore offer that kind of flexibility.
For now, I'm taking a wait-and-see approach with my TuneCore distributed album. Its annual sales don't justify paying a $49.99 maintenance fee, but TuneCore has announced a new "YouTube deal." No details are available yet, but I'm guessing that it involves inclusion of TuneCore-distribution material in YouTube's AudioSwap program, which allows YouTube users to add pre-cleared music to their videos, with a small royalty paid to the artist for each play. If so, that income stream might be enough for me to keep the album with TuneCore. If not, I'll make the switch to CD Baby.
tags: digital music TuneCore CD Baby
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April 26, 2011
Stop the Presses: Most Self-Released Artists Earn Very Little from Digital Music Salesby David Harrell
Paul Resnikoff of Digital Music News seems surprised that the average TuneCore artist is earning just $179 a year from digital music sales, and cites a similar figure ($174) for CD Baby artists.
As a self-released musician who uses both services, I'm not. I'd also point out that these averages are probably boosted by the sales of the top-selling artists in both catalogs. The median annual sales figure -- the dollar amount that divides the artists into two equal groups, one earning more than the median and one earning less -- might be even smaller. (Though it's also mathematically possible for the median to be more than the mean, which would occur if large numbers of self-released artists are selling just a few dollars worth of digital music each year.)
I'm working on an in-depth post about the economics and pricing of both services, but I really have nothing negative to say about either company -- both provide access to worldwide distribution that was unthinkable for a self-released musician a decade ago. Yet while the total sales for TuneCore and CD Baby artists add up to some impressive numbers, the actual market for most individual self-released (and self-promoted) artists is minimal.
tags: digital music TuneCore CD Baby self-released music
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April 25, 2011
Would 99-Cent Albums Find the Same Success as 99-Cent Books?by David Harrell
There was a fascinating story in the Wall Street Journal last week about self-published authors who are selling a ton of bargain-priced digital books at Amazon.com:
Mr. Locke, who published his first paperback two years ago at age 58, says he decided to jump into digital publishing in March 2010 after studying e-book pricing.The article doesn't specify if these ultra-cheap books are crowding out sales of higher-priced digital books or if it's an example of the price elasticity of demand, where the cheap goods are causing consumers of digital books to purchase more than they would at traditional prices.
"When I saw that highly successful authors were charging $9.99 for an e-book, I thought that if I can make a profit at 99 cents, I no longer have to prove I'm as good as them," says Mr. Locke. "Rather, they have to prove they are ten times better than me."
Mr. Locke earns 35 cents for every title he sells at 99 cents. Altogether, he says his publishing revenue amounted to $126,000 from Amazon in March alone. It costs him about $1,000 to have his book published digitally, complete with an original dust jacket image. He also hires an editor to work with him at additional expense.
In March, he sold 369,000 downloads on Amazon, up from about 75,000 in January and just 1,300 in November. His titles are also sold by digital bookstores operated by Kobo Inc., Barnes & Noble Inc., and Apple.
My immediate question -- would 99-cent digital albums from unknown musicians find similar chart success at Amazon MP3 (and iTunes), or are book fans more likely than music fans to accept low-cost substitutes for name brand content?
One anecdotal example is the daily digital special at Amazon MP3, which invariably tops Amazon MP3's download chart (or at least lands in the top five), even when the artist is relatively unknown. Yet with thousands of musicians already trying to give away free music, music fans have almost endless choices for free downloads, even without turning to P2P networks. And while free digital books are available for thousands of out-of-copyright works, readers looking to fill their Kindles have fewer options than music fans for finding free versions of recent works.
Then again, free mp3s on artist websites, music blogs, MySpace, Facebook, etc., are a different matter than bargain-priced material sold within the dominant digital marketplace. If promoted on the homepages of iTunes and Amazon MP3, it seems likely that the highest-quality bargain albums (as determined by customer reviews) might climb the download charts.
tags: digital music Amazon MP3 iTunes price elasticity of demand digital content pricing
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April 08, 2011
Cloudy Logicby David Harrell
After last week's announcement of Amazon's Cloud Drive and Cloud Player, several digital music commentators wrote that storing music in the cloud might hamper subscriptions to music streaming services -- and maybe even result in an increase in illegal downloads from P2P platforms. While it's not an unreasonable conclusion that some consumers will prefer streaming their own music collections from the cloud over paying for subscription services (and that some of those online collections will include music that was illegally downloaded), I doubt that cloud storage is a cause for alarm when it comes to music subscriptions.
Music subscription services are, without a doubt, an incredible value proposition. They provide access to literally millions of tracks for as little as $5 a month (That's what I'm paying for my "computer only" MOG subscription, mobile phone access brings the price to $10 a month). Yet music fans have yet to embrace them, on a large scale, as a substitute for owning music. From what I've read, their appeal (so far) is mostly to voracious listeners who want easy access to the immense music catalogs they offer.
While many of these current subscribers have large music collections, it seems unlikely that having access to their libraries via the cloud would diminish the appeal of a music subscription. Even the largest private digital music collection pales in comparison to the catalogs of Rhapsody, Napster, MOG, and Spotify.
And commercial cloud storage won't be free -- my iTunes library would cost $100 a year to store on Amazon's Cloud Drive and I've ripped just half of my CD collection to mp3. Indeed, for these music fans, it seems more likely that a music subscription would discourage cloud storage, not the other way around. (Though I personally want both -- all of my digital music in the cloud AND access to the entire catalog of a subscription service.)
It remains to be seen if music subscriptions will ever take off -- maybe the U.S. launch of Spotify will be the best test of the viability of the subscription model. But if the public continues to snub subscriptions, I won't be blaming music lockers.
What do you think -- does the prospect of cloud storage make subscription services less appealing?
tags: digital music music subscriptions Spotify Napster Rhapsody MOG Amazon Cloud Drive Amazon Cloud Player AMZN
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March 31, 2011
What Will the PROs Think of the Cloud?by David Harrell
Personally, I'm in complete agreement with Amazon's assertion that it doesn't need permission from the music labels to allow consumers to store (and stream) their personal music files online. The major label groups obviously think differently, so I hope any court decisions will give the legal blessing to what seems like commonsense.
One thing I haven't seen this week is any reaction from the performance rights organizations -- ASCAP, BMI (I'm a member as a songwriter), and SESAC. Given that ASCAP made the unsuccessful legal claim that purchasing and downloading a music file also constitutes a public performance, which should result in payment to the song's publisher and writer, I wouldn't be surprised to see a similar claim that streaming a purchased song from an online locker also counts as a performance.
tags: digital music Amazon Cloud Drive Amazon Cloud Player AMZN BMI ASCAP performance royalties
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March 30, 2011
Like It's 1998: Some Quick Thoughts on the NY Times Paywallby David Harrell
The NY Times has flipped the switch, activating its new paywall/digital subscription model and I can't help thinking of 1998, the year that Slate began what turned out to be a short-lived experiment with a subscription model.
At the time, I was part of the small editorial team for Morningstar.com, which had launched the previous year. While that site was (and still is) an investment research and portfolio tracking destination, as opposed to a news/opinion magazine, Slate often came up as an example when we first planned the format and design of our longer articles.
So when Slate first announced its plan to move to a subscription model, it set off hours of discussion with my co-workers about the ethics of sharing your Slate login (keep in mind, this was before the launch of Napster and the large-scale P2P exchange of digital music files). As best as I can recall, we hit upon many of the main arguments, pro and con, that would soon arise with the advent of P2P music sharing: Is it truly theft when it doesn't result in the loss of a sale?, the fact that consumers can easily share physical content such as magazines, books, and CDs (though obviously not concurrently and only with people who are nearby), the challenge of charging for online content when there are numerous free alternatives, and so on.
I held out for a month or so before I finally succumbed and paid -- there was obviously no Twitter workaround and, believe it or not, back then Slate articles frequently came up in conversations with friends. Besides, the annual subscription was only $19.95 and Slate threw in a free umbrella. Then, before my subscription ran out, Slate abandoned the pay model and refunded my balance for the year by sending me a few issues of a now-defunct Web 2.0 magazine.
Thirteen years later, the NY Times is obviously trying to thread several needles at once with its subscription plan by setting a price point that maximizes its subscription revenue while it maintains its search engine rankings by allowing a minimum number of free page views each month. And unlike Slate, the Times serves at least two distinct audiences -- those in the NYC region who would read the paper even if there were no online version, and those of us outside the region who probably wouldn't pay for a daily print subscription if that were our only option. Its digital pricing strategy has to account for the possibility of cannibalizing print subscriptions. (Assuming that those subscriptions are indeed more profitable.)
I truly have no problem with the NY Times charging for access to its website (it'd be hypocritical of me if I did, as my employer derives a fair amount of revenue from the folks who are paying $185 a year for subscriptions to the premium version of Morningstar.com). Yet the cheapest digital-only NY Times subscription, $195 a year, still strikes me as too high.
You can, of course, make a very valid argument that $195 is a relative bargain, especially when compared to a daily print subscription. And I remain somewhat amazed by how eager media consumers are to pay for their hardware (iPods, iPads, and smart phones) yet so reluctant to purchase the content they consume on those devices. But given the ready availability of other quality online news sources (The Washington Post, the BBC, etc.) and the fact that the NY Times paywall appears to be easy enough to get around, I wonder if a subscription price at the premium magazine level (the New Yorker's $40, for example) would generate more total revenue.
For now, I'm going to make do with my 20 free articles each month, plus those I can read via FB and Twitter links. But if the price drops below $50 a year and the Times tosses in a free umbrella, count me in.
tags: economics of digital content NY Times Paywall
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March 24, 2011
How NOT to Win a New Fanby David Harrell
I clicked a link on Facebook today to visit the band website of a friend of a friend. And that's as far as I got, as I was sent to rather snotty redirect page, telling me to go download Firefox and then come back. (You can't even get past the redirect page using IE.)
If you want to optimize your website for certain browsers, that's fine. Yet to not let a potential fan in the door is just shooting yourself in the foot. I happened to have IE open and I could have easily fired up Firefox. But at that point I wasn't going to bother...
tags: digital music band websites
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March 22, 2011
The Downside of eMusic's Currency Pricingby David Harrell
Even after last year's subscription changes, average album prices at eMusic are no doubt less than the average prices at iTunes, Amazon MP3, and other digital music stores. Yet I believe that eMusic's switch from a credits system to currency pricing, in combination with Amazon MP3's $5 album deals and daily specials, presents a real challenge to eMusic's subscription-based business model.
Here's why: With eMusic's old credit-based system, direct comparisons to prices in other digital stores weren't straightforward. The math certainly wasn't difficult, but "12 credits" was an entirely different animal than "$5.99," which is now the default eMusic price for many new releases. Your credit card was charged every 30 days, credits showed up in your account, and you used them to download albums and tracks. Any price considerations you made were likely based on the number of credits required for an individual album -- that is, based on the number of tracks and credits required, was it relatively expensive or a relative bargain? You might have done the math to figure out the dollar amount for either extreme, but in general, you were probably more likely to think in credits than in dollars and cents.
Now, you see the price of each album spelled in dollars and cents, which has a two-fold effect: 1. It reminds you again of what you're actually paying for the album (something you were less likely to think about under the credit system), and 2. It invites direct price comparisons with other digital stores, namely the daily specials and $5 album deals at Amazon MP3. (It's slightly more complicated than that, because some existing subscribers received monthly bonuses when currency pricing was implemented. For example, I currently pay $11.99 every 30 days, but my account is credited with $13.99, making my true cost of a $5.99 album just $5.13.)
Chances are, the price of any individual album is still less at eMusic than at Amazon MP3. Yet when you think about how a subscription actually works, the eMusic advantage become less apparent. That's because no one is ever buying the entire eMusic catalog. With an $11.99 eMusic subscription, you can download approximately two albums every 30 days. You have tens of thousands of albums to choose from, but you have to decide on two to download. (We'll get to individual track downloads in a minute.)
At Amazon MP3, the total catalog is the same size, if not larger, but your bargain pool of $5 monthly specials (as well as whatever shows up as the daily deal, which is most frequently priced at $3.99) is a relatively small one. Yet as long as you can find just two albums you'd like to each month for $5 a piece, you can probably equal your total eMusic album downloads for a lower price. And you're not locked into an ongoing subscription where, if you lose track of the expiration date, you can lose most of the money you paid for the most-recent period.
I've heard from at least two friends that the $5 Amazon specials are making them re-think their eMusic subscriptions. Granted, that's a tiny sample size, and perhaps it's an anomaly, but I can't help wondering if a larger number of eMusic subscribers (and potential subscribers) are thinking the same way. Over at eMusic's message board, subscribers will often point out the availability of albums for less at Amazon MP3 or other stores.
The switch to currency pricing was made, of course, to accommodate variable track/album pricing within the eMusic catalog. Another option would have been to allow fractional pricing -- charging one credit for some tracks and one-and-a-half for others -- but that approach just seems messy. Another possibility would've have been to "deflate" the credits. That is, give more credits for each subscription price point, say 100 for $11.99 instead of 30, and then charge more credits for each track -- some songs would be two credits, some would be three, and so on. My guess is that eMusic considered these options and others, and decided that straight currency pricing, if not an ideal solution, was its best option.
For myself, the bargain appeal of eMusic is more now obvious for individual songs than with full albums, at least for new releases. Individual tracks are priced at 49 cents, 79 cents, or 89 cents. With my $2 bonus each 30 days, that makes my cost for individual track 42, 68, or 76 cents, prices you won't find at Amazon MP3 or iTunes, where prices for individual songs top out at $1.29.
tags: digital music eMusic Amazon MP3 iTunes
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THE LAYAWAYS
Out Now -- "Maybe Next Year" -- The New Holiday Album:
"This is a sweet treat, deliciously musical without being overbaked for mass media consumption." -- Hyperbolium
"Perfect listening to accompany whatever holiday preparations you may be making today." -- Bag of Songs
O Christmas Tree - free mp3 lyrics and song details
Away In A Manger - free mp3
Download from eMusic, iTunes, Amazon MP3, or Bandcamp. Listen to free streams at Last.fm.
"...about as melodic and hooky as indie pop can get." -- Absolute Powerpop
"Their laid-back, '60s era sounds are absolutely delightening." -- 3hive
"...melodic, garage-influenced shoegaze." -- RCRD LBL
Where The Conversation Ends - free mp3
January - free mp3
Keep It To Yourself - free mp3
Download from eMusic, iTunes, Amazon MP3, or CD Baby, stream it at Last.fm or Napster.
"The Layaways make fine indie pop. Hushed vocals interweave with understated buzzing guitars. The whole LP is a revelation from the start." -- Lost Music
"Catchy Guided by Voices-like rockers who lay it on sweetly and sincerely, just like Lionel Richie." -- WRUV Radio
Silence - free mp3 lyrics and song details
The Long Night - free mp3
Download from eMusic, Amazon MP3, or iTunes, stream it at Last.fm, Napster, or Rhapsody.
"These are songs that you want to take home with you, curl up with, hold them close -- and pray that they are still with you when you wake up." -- The Big Takeover
Let Me In - free mp3
Ocean Blue - free mp3
Download from eMusic, Amazon MP3, or iTunes, stream it at Last.fm, Napster, or Rhapsody.
More Layaways downloads:
the layaways website