What would be the ‘all in one’, ultimate online web solution for independent artists and record labels?
I’ve spent years (see: decades) writing, playing and promoting music in one form or another, and I have always longed for the ‘one place’ where everything you could ever need to release your music would be available.
If we ignore the obvious features such as artist/label profile, gig listings, etc. There are many features that I believe such a site would comprise, and all of them are currently available by using one website or another separately. Therefore there is no reason that these features cannot be combined into one 'ultimate' site for independent music.
ALL INCLUSIVE digital distribution
Many sites offer digital distribution where you pay a set up/yearly fee and then pay per store from a (sometimes) fairly limited list to have your music distributed across the major web shops. There is a different service provided by CD Baby. You pay a set up fee to be a CD Baby artist ($35 - the same as most digital distribution services) and then CD Baby distributes your music to ALL of it's digital partners (unless you specify otherwise), even when they add new partners these are automatically included.
CD Baby take a small cut of sales from the distribution, however I would say this was more than fair for the service they offer.
Existing Website: CD Baby
Physical Distribution partners
Now, It may seem that through this post that I work for CD Baby in some sort of PR department, however it is simply the case that they come the closest to providing the solution that I am outlining. CD Baby have an agreement with American physical distributor Super-D meaning that when you sign up with CD Baby, your CD is available to over 2400 independent stores in the US as well as online stores such as CD Universe. This is possible because CD Baby hold stock of each artist's CD, numbers of which depends on sales of the CD in question. Again, CD Baby take a cut for this service.
In my opinion the UK is desperately missing this sort of service. It would only take an agreement with one independent distributor and the same service could easily be offered in this country. In fact, the major downside of CD Baby is that it is very US focused, however this only creates opportunity in the UK market.
Existing Website: CD Baby
Sell directly to the fans
Having your music on iTunes and your CDs in Amazon is great and all, but they take a cut of your money when you could just as easily sell directly to fans yourself.
Bandcamp offers what I would consider the cleanest and most efficient solution for selling or giving away digital audio (not just mp3s - Bandcamp offers a LOT of different audio types to download). No charge and you can even have your fans name their price for downloads.
CD Baby sells artists' CDs (of course, taking a cut), but although they do ship worldwide, this does entail the artist or label sending stock to America. Setting up as a business on Paypal (which is one of the options you could do to receive Bandcamp payments anyway) offers you the chance to embed simple 'buy it now' buttons onto a website enabling an artist or label to sell directly through their own site.
Another option is Big Cartel which I will look at next.
Existing Websites: Bandcamp, CD Baby, Paypal, Big Cartel
Merchandise
As discussed in this blog post there are two main ways to sell music merchandise - initial bulk orders that the artist/label sell themselves for a profit, or made to order merchandise. For the purposes of this section I will look at the idea of artists and labels selling their own merchandise as I will look in more depth at the made to order option later in this post.
One of the most popular sites on the internet for selling clothing and CDs is Big Cartel. The site offers fully integrated shop product page, shopping cart, and stock management. There is a sliding scale of features ranging from a basic free version up to a premium fully featured online shop.
Don't forget of course, that like CDs, Paypal offers solutions for integrating into existing websites.
Existing Websites: Big Cartel, Paypal
Made to order products
I've kept this separate from merchandise as there are also sites that offer made-to-order CDs. Digital distributor Tunecore recently partnered with one such service, Amazon's Createspace, to offer users a solution incorporating Digital distribution as well as potential worldwide availability of made to order CDs.
Lulu.com also offer made to order CD publishing, however their worldwide shipping costs mean they are no real match for Createspace when it comes to a distribution option.
Both Spreadshirt and Cafepress are leading websites when it comes to made to order merchandise. They offer all manner of merch, from T-shirts to wall clocks to dog coats.
Made to order products have the advantage of having little to no upfront cost, but the disadvantage of very low profit margins as the company has to recover their costs of making a one of product before any profit is passed on to the artist/label.
However, having both options; selling your own merchandise and physical music as well as made to order products, on one website would only serve to widen the appeal of such a service (imagine a 15/16 year old school band who cut a demo at a local studio. They know they could sell 100-200 CDs to the other kids in their school, but they have no way of affording the initial manufacture, and want better product than home made CDRs. They can just point their classmates to their site and start selling not only CDs, but T shirts, without any start up costs).
*NOTE* One of the first ever 'band mp3 websites', before myspace, purevolume, reverbnation and bandcamp, was mp3.com. As well as offering free or paid downloads of any artist's music via mp3, they also offered made to order CDs that could be ordered by the fans. I myself still have an mp3.com CD I bought from the site. I find it odd that this practice was somewhat forgotten as more and more websites for bands came into existence.
Existing Websites: Tunecore/Createspace, Lulu.com, Spreadshirt, Cafepress
Analytics/Widgets/Synchronisation
I've rather callously lumped these features together for two reasons. Firstly, this blog post would be huge otherwise, but also most sites that offer one, offer all of the above.
Reverbnation are the kings of the widget. They have widgets that are music players, that have all tour dates that an artist is playing (with optional map), picture widgets, video widgets, press review widgets, mailing list widgets, blog widgets. They even have a widget that is all of the above widgets in one widget. THE UBER WIDGET.
They also offer analytics as well as features enabling you to see where on the internet your act is being talked about. They also offer synchronisation, so that when you update your reverbnation it updates your twitter, myspace and facebook automatically (however having used this feature myself, it doesn't exactly do what it says on the tin).
As well as all of this Reverbnation offers digital distribution and the ability to link out to physical merchandise and music stores where an artist's product is available.
Existing sites: Reverbnation, Bandcamp, Band Metrics
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So along with CD Baby, Reverbnation come pretty damn close to what would be, in my opinion, the 'ultimate' site for musicians. However, they don't quite tick every box.
To tick every box on this list would take a lot of time, effort, and money, but if someone was to nail it then I can guarantee that every single small to medium music enterprise would want to be part of it, and you would make millions. And the big thing to remember is this: It is TOTALLY POSSIBLE. The websites listed above prove that, it is just a case of combining the technologies and the know how into a complete package.
What have I missed from this tool box? Who else offers similar solutions? Have I missed someone who offers it all? Am I completely wrong about all of this and this isn't what artists want at all?
