HFA - mechanical licenses for cover songs

"Songfile" can be used by musicians who plan to make and distribute 2,500 copies or less of their recordings to obtain the necessary licenses for cover versions of songs. Licenses can be obtained for CDs, cassettes, LPs, or permanent digital downloads (DPDs).

Customers can create an account with the Songfile service, search HFA’s catalog of almost 1.9 million songs, and complete their mechanical licensing transaction in minutes. Royalties are calculated at the statutory mechanical rate (currently 9.1¢ per copy for songs 5 minutes or less in length, or 1.75¢ per minute (or fraction thereof) per copy, for songs over 5 minutes). There is also a nominal processing fee ($13-15) on each song licensed.

Best Buy To Open In-store Music Centers

Hoping to cater to everyone from the garage guitarist to a recording musician, Best Buy Co. Inc. is announcing a massive new initiative that sets aside store space for an array of musical instruments and gear in dozens of sites nationwide.

The nation's largest consumer electronics retailer will announce Tuesday that it plans to open as many as 85 of the music centers inside its stores by the end of the year and could add even more locations in the future, executives told The Associated Press.

Each site will use about 2,500 square feet of retail space and include roughly 1,000 different products with well-known brand names such as Fender, Gibson, Drum Workshop and Roland.

"We're not just extending the shelf space in the store, we're creating a designated area specifically for this experience," said Kevin Balon, the company's vice president of musical instruments. "And we're trying to create an authentic and genuine musical instrument store look and feel inside of Best Buy."

The Richfield, Minn.-based retailer - already an industry leader in sales of everything from digital cameras to video games - will use its headfirst jump into the $8 billion U.S. musical instrument market to carve out new revenue opportunities as sales of CDs and DVDs slow, experts said.

When the rollout is complete, Best Buy - already considered by many investors to be a global powerhouse in the electronics retailing world - will become the second-largest instrument seller in the country based on locations.

But some observers are cautious about whether the expansion efforts will reap big rewards, particularly as the nation's economy slows and consumers become even more particular about spending hard-earned paychecks.

"It's not a high-growth area and it's obviously going to take up a lot of real estate," said Morningstar retail analyst Brady Lemos.

Executives declined to comment on how much the company is investing in the project or how much they expect to gain from the store-within-a-store effort.

So far, ten sites are already open, including five in California, two in Illinois and two in Minnesota.

Best Buy's selection will include everything from accessories - picks, sheet music and cases - to high-end basses, guitars, keyboards and DJ equipment. Instruments will be housed in separate rooms and the company also plans to offer group music lessons.

Acoustic guitars will sell between $89.99 and $3,200 and drum kits will retail for as much as $5,000.

A selection of the offerings will also be available online in early August.
"However you want to play, if play means you're just learning and you want to play with a bunch of buddies, or you want to play on stage, we can support any of that," Balon said

5 Lies Indie Musicians Tell Themselves

1. "The internet leveled the playing field for indie music." - Big checkbooks and the marketing campaigns they buy still have the edge. The internet just opened the door for everyone. It's what you do now that you're in the now overcrowded room that matters.
2. "I'm going D.I.Y." - Sorry, but you can't Do It all Yourself. You need a team; preferably an experienced one. Just for starters: manager, agent, web guru, marketing and PR.
3. "The quality of the music matters more now." - It has always started with a great song...or at least a catchy one. That hasn't changed and neither has the fact that after that it's still about hard work, who your champions are and luck.
4. "Now that the FCC ended payola, my music has a chance at radio." - Dream on. There are still gatekeepers and they still don't care about you.
5. "My sales suck, but so do everyone else's." Sure the numbers have changed, but if you can't get people to pay something for your music then you've got a problem...with your music.

Artist Quote of the Week

Record companies, believe me, no matter what record company you're with, they're going to try to hype you, because, really, all record companies are interested in is making money.

-Elton John

Music in China Part II

The arrival of western product in the early 90s came courtesy of ‘saw-gashed’ CDs: Excess stock and deleted titles from western majors attempting to avoid taxation and disposal costs. These CDs had their cases cut to mark them as defective and were then shipped in to China through free-market economic ports like Guangzhou, only to end up on the black market. An end result that can be seen as a partial ‘shooting-in-the-foot’ for the western majors who then had to come in and fight against the pirate networks they inadvertently helped set up.

A standard pirate CD retails for about 60p, whereas the legitimate product goes for around two to three times that - £1.50 to £2. This obviously makes piracy a big business with plenty of people profiting, plenty of vested interests and not a whole lot of will to change. There is the occasional very public haul of counterfeit CDs, but realistically this is already a lost battle when you consider the impending end of the CD format.

CD manufacturing plants are mainly state run but this does not deter rampant ‘third shift piracy’ in which, once the two normal daily factory shifts are completed, a third one goes on through the night to make the same product for the pirate market. That’s right, state-run piracy.

As with most areas of business, the retail sector is a black hole of statistics, where misinformation and mendaciousness are key pirate protection devices. A visit to China will clear this up for you nicely as you only have to wander around a few streets and speak to a few ‘legitimate’ retailers to see the impossibility of gathering any meaningful statistics. Even legitimate retailers like FAB stock some pirated goods and it takes a very keen eye to spot the difference in some cases, although most pirated CDs are laughably poor quality.

iLike Offers New Tools To Concert Promoters

iLike is reaching out to concert promoters with a new set of tools designed to transform its social music discovery service into a more overt advertising platform.

The company has added new tools that let promoters, venue owners, booking agents and bands place advertising for upcoming shows on the iLike system on their own. These tools allow users to target their ads based on iLike members' professed musical tastes and location, as well as provide them various ad-building and distribution features such as the addition of audio song sampling video clips.

These tools add to iLike's existing social networking capabilities, which will allow users to invite friends to concerts they discover via the platform.

iLike says it now has 30 million registered users, and is taking additional steps to not only acquire more, but also add more value to those already on the system. It recently teamed with Rhapsody to offer full-song streaming downloads (25 per month, or unlimited for existing Rhapsody members).

On the heels of the concert ad-network announcement, iLike is also reaching out to third-party Web site developers with a deal that would let them use iLike to become their default music provider.

The service won't launch until later this quarter, but is designed to let developers embed all iLike functionality -- including full-song streaming -- into their sites. It's still unclear what type of personalized integration these developers will have to customize the iLike experience on their sites, or the costs involved.

Music In China... Part I

As in most other Asian markets, pop music has a real stranglehold over the mainstream
- Mando-Pop, Canto-Pop, J-Pop, K-Pop - glossy, inoffensive music that satisfies the censors as well as the ‘bland criteria’ necessary for across-the-board media coverage. Despite the diverse musical heritage of China, mainstream pop is almost entirely informed by western music, from the basic pop song format through to instrumentation and lyrical content, although general production quality is still fairly poor. The Chinese audience, therefore, are already well familiar with all of the stock traits of western music: Guitar solos, crap raps in the middle-eight of pop songs, warbly diva vocals, key changes at the end of ballads, pseudo-rock bands, pseudo-hip-hop bands etc.

Your average western band, therefore, does not sound totally alien, it's just that no one is willing to spend money promoting an international (and therefore niche) act when 90 per cent of CDs are counterfeit and an even higher percent of online music is pinched. It’s all about hitting the mass market straight out of the box and selling big, if you want a chance of making money.

Such a high piracy rate leaves you with a legitimate physical market of only $86m a year (2006 figures), making China - a country of 1.3 billion people, remember – into only the 20th largest market in the world. Physical has never really had a good time in China.

Artist Quote of the Week

"People don't want to see a whole lot of crap anymore than they want to see one piece of crap."

--Wayne Forte, ITC

1,000 True Fans

The long tail is famously good news for two classes of people; a few lucky aggregators, such as Amazon and Netflix, and 6 billion consumers. Of those two, I think consumers earn the greater reward from the wealth hidden in infinite niches.

But the long tail is a decidedly mixed blessing for creators. Individual artists, producers, inventors and makers are overlooked in the equation. The long tail does not raise the sales of creators much, but it does add massive competition and endless downward pressure on prices. Unless artists become a large aggregator of other artist's works, the long tail offers no path out of the quiet doldrums of minuscule sales.

Other than aim for a blockbuster hit, what can an artist do to escape the long tail?

One solution is to find 1,000 True Fans. While some artists have discovered this path without calling it that, I think it is worth trying to formalize. The gist of 1,000 True Fans can be stated simply:

A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author - in other words, anyone producing works of art - needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living.

A True Fan is defined as someone who will purchase anything and everything you produce. They will drive 200 miles to see you sing. They will buy the super deluxe re-issued hi-res box set of your stuff even though they have the low-res version. They have a Google Alert set for your name. They bookmark the eBay page where your out-of-print editions show up. They come to your openings. They have you sign their copies. They buy the t-shirt, and the mug, and the hat. They can't wait till you issue your next work. They are true fans.


read the entire article@http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/03/1000_true_fans.php

Turn Off Radio, Tune Into Marketing

Music labels have depended on radio airplay for so long, they have never learned the art of effective and relevant marketing, a scenario that has contributed to the current industry slump.

That is the damning message from Terry McBride, co-founder/CEO of Canada's Nettwerk Music Group and author of the recently-published report "Meet the Millennials," which identifies and analyses the habits of young music fans born around the turn of the millennium.

"The record companies and the management companies should understand their audience," he says. "They should know what their audience do from when they wake up to when they go to bed. That is the marketing process."

McBride was speaking to Billboard.biz just before his arrival in London to host "Face to Face With the Millennials," an industry forum taking place July 17 at London's Imagination Gallery.

"The industry used to think that way in the past, but it was an add-on to the radio media. They based their strategies around radio, press coverage, and (point-of-sale) advertising. Everything else came after that," he added.

"But radio and traditional media have been thrown out the door," he continues. "Consumers now ignore the radio and print media, and they no longer go into stores."

McBride advised that the industry should now raise the bar of their previously neglected marketing skills. "The bastard child that used to be kept outside the door should now be made to feel welcome. All that lifestyle marketing is now much more relevant."

Several label and industry executives will also be among the discussion groups at Thursday's industry gathering, including former recording artist-turned-radio DJ Tom Robinson, who will interview a group of young consumers from the millennial age demographic.

New Music Web Sites...

A new website is promising to put the Music Industry on its' head. DanceFreeway.com is a new site dedicated to offering free MP3 downloads of Dance Music in an easy to use environment.

"So what's the catch?", asked Ron HIrsch of DanceFreeway.com. "There is no catch. Yes, you will see ads on the site, but they won't interfere with your ability to stream or download music...all at no charge."

The site is actually the brainchild of record label, Act 2 Records. So why would a record label design a site to give away their music and others'? Isn't that counter productive to making money? I asked this question to Act 2's President Ron Hirsch. He said that "the Economics of the Music Industry have changed so dramatically, that it has forced us to re-evaluate how people value music. Clearly people still enjoy music, but they're just not going to pay $16 for a CD anymore. And frankly, 99 cents or lower for a download is a good deal for the consumer, however it's too small a margin for a label to sustain itself."

So then what is the value of music? Mr. Hirsch believes that "music has value as a promotional product. And that the Music Industry's future will more closely resemble other mediums like radio and television. Specifically, we will offer a free product (ie music), and sustain ourselves by selling advertisements."

DanceFreeway.com (http://DanceFreeway.com) was launched in May 2008 with 2 sister sites (HipHopFreeway.com (http://hiphopfreeway.com) & RockFreeway.com (http://rockfreeway.com)) being launched in June. Mr. Hirsch states that "so far the amount of traffic and the amount of downloads has greatly surpassed our most aggressive estimates."

But not everything's free on the site. The basic premise for the site is that in exchange for Artist's offering songs for free, they will be allowed to post additional songs that people can purchase and they will receive 100% of the net proceeds.

"It's really a win-win-win & win concept", says Mr. Hirsch. "The User wins by getting free downloads in an easy to use legal environment. The Artist wins by getting exposure to new fans and incremental revenue. The Advertiser wins by getting a targeted consumer. And we win by creating an additional stream of revenue for ourselves."

Mr. Hirsch goes on to say: "It's really a fun process. It's like the old days again. We help new Artists' get exposure, (recently having one get signed to a major record deal), and we also get to turn people on to some great new music. What could be better?"

Artists may "Get On The Freeway (http://dancefreeway.com/Artist_Submission.html)" by submitting an application on line at one of the three current sites. Future sites include CountryFreeway, IndieFreeway, LatinFreeway, ChristianFreeway and others.

Artist Quote of the Week

"Don't try to explain it, just sell it."
--Colonel Tom Parker

Connecting Bands With Talent Buyers

OurStage.com has launched a new online tool to help up-and-coming acts book concerts, while allowing music venue talent buyers to browse for new talent on the road.

The Web site’s new Marketplace tool allows bands to sign up for a free electronic press kit, which can be viewed by talent buyers across the country. Concert bookers can also listen to music the artist has uploaded to OurStage, which is ranked by fans who use the site.

To help push the new online tool, OurStage has teamed up with Live Nation, which has reserved 300 performance slots for the site’s top-ranked artists.

OurStage allows artists to upload music and videos, which are later voted on by fans. Since launching in March 2007, the Web site has partnered such music festivals as Bonnaroo, Bumbershoot, Newport Folk Festival, JVC Jazz Festival Newport and Noise Pop.

Executing a great marketing strategy?

In today’s music business, having an effective web marketing strategy can make the difference between you being a local, national or international music star.

A key element in your web marketing strategy should be the selection of your bands name. Why? Because your bands name will also become your bands keyword on the Internet.

I’m sure you’ve heard of references to AOL Keywords, but AOL isn’t the only place where people use keywords for search. Google, Yahoo, MSN, ASK and many other search engines use keywords to help millions of people find what they are looking for on-line.

If someone is looking for information about your band on the Internet, they are most likely, going to type your bands name into a search engine. When the search engine returns the results, you’ll want your website, or your myspace page to be in the top of the listings.

My suggestion is to choose a crazy (or very creative) keyword. A crazy band name, when used as a keyword, will help your listings in search engines beyond your wildest imagination.

Digital Sales Predicted To Pass CDs By 2012

A new study from Forrester Research Inc. predicts that half of all music sold in the U.S. will be digital sales by the year 2011, with digital music surpassing the CD in 2012. The Massachusetts-based research firm says that digital music sales will increased with a compound annual growth of 23 percent over the next five years, bringing in $4.8 billion by 2012. However, CD sales figures will continue to decline to $3.8 billion by 2012.

"This is the end of the music industry as we know it," stated James McQuivey, VP and principal analyst at Forrester Research. "Media executives eager to stay afloat in this receding tide must clear the path of discovery and purchase, but only hardware and software providers can ultimately make listening to music as easy as turning on the radio."

Forrester adds that although major music chains such as Tower and Sam Goody have shuttered stores, when retailers like Best Buy and Wal-Mart give music less floor space, it will truly signal the end for CDs. The company also predicts that "experiments in ad-supported downloads will be silenced by the powerful combination of DRM-free music and on-demand music streaming on sites like imeem.com.:

Mid-Year Sales Report

At the mid-point of 2008, U.S. album sales stand at an 11% decline when compared to the same period a year ago. Though not as precipitous a drop as the one recorded in the first half of 2007 (15.1%), this year's first half tally is 204.6 million units, according to Nielsen SoundScan. That’s compared to 229.8 million units scanned in the first six months of 2007.

That drop is fueled largely by the 16.3% decrease in CD sales; digital albums posted a 34.4% increase to 31.6 million units and now account for 15.4% of album sales. Digital tracks continue to be a bright spot, growing 30% to 532.7 million units in the six month period ended June 29. That compares with the 417.3 million recorded in the six-month period ended July 1, 2007.

At this point, the top-selling album was Lil Wayne's "Tha Carter III," with 1.5 million scans; followed by Jack Johnson's "Sleep Through The Static," at 1.2 million; and Mariah Carey's "E=MC2," with 1.1 million units.

The best selling tracks were led by Leona Lewis' "Bleeding Love," at 2.6 million units; followed by Flo Rida's "Low," featuring T-Pain with 2.4 million units; and Jordan Sparks "No Air" duet with Chris Brown, which clocked 2.1 million units.

Looking at album market share, the Universal Music Group continues to dominate the U.S. industry with a 31.2%. But that's down from the 31.5% the company posted in the first six months of 2007. Sony BMG Music Entertainment also lost market share. The company finished the first half with 24.8%, down from the 25.3% it had in the corresponding period last year. Coming in third in the rankings, WEA tallied 20.8% share in the first six months of the year, up nearly one percentage point from the 20% it recorded in the first half of last year. EMI’s market share fell to 9.4% from the 10.4% it had last year.

Like WMG, the indies where the only other group to gain market share, finishing collectively with 13.9%, up from the 12.9% the group garnered in the first half of last year.

Tunecore sweetens deal

Digital distributor TuneCore is now sweetening the deal with a one-price, one-track distribution plan. The company will soon distribute any artist track across eleven stores for a flat price of $9.99, according to information shared by the company on Friday. That replaces a pricing formula that includes per-song, per-store and yearly maintenance fees. The new, flat-rate plan starts June 20th.


The TuneCore distribution network includes iTunes Stores in the US, Canada, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and Europe. Others include AmazonMP3, eMusic, Napster, Rhapsody, LaLa, and GroupieTunes. Artists retain all royalties, and TuneCore deals are non-exclusive. Added 06/09/2008.