MP3tunes has launched. It's the new DRM-free music downloading site by Michael Robertson, formerly of MP3.com. The site is painfully slow under the load right now so enter at your own risk. Songs are 88 cents, albums are $8.88, which are both lower than iTunes. The about page says artists get almost 60 cents a song and almost $6 an album. (Then subtract the digital distributor's cut before it gets to the artist, which can range tremendously.)

My album I Don't Know What I'm Doing is in there here. I have kind of a morbid fascination with what genres music services jam me in. MP3tunes puts me in Pop / Quirky, which seems as good a place for me as any.

Since the site's swamped I haven't gotten to look around much, but dudes, what is up with the heavy truncation on artist names and album titles? On the front page I see "Theme Fr..." by "Elias K...", "Figures...." by "Two Ton...", Serenade..." by "Rachell...", Capricor..." by Mark Ha...". When not a single artist on the front page can fit their full name or album title, it's time to shrink the font or widen the screen or something so visitors can read what the hell they're supposed to click on and buy. And mouseovers on the truncated titles would be nice.

It'll be interesting to see if MP3tunes catches on with the anti-DRM set. Will they accept it as a good way to get media in a format that's useful to them or call "too expensive" on it and keep downloading music for free? Guess we'll see.

Here's a thread from Ask Metafilter discussing the gap between perceived success as a musician and actual financial success. It's mostly anecdotes about famous or semi-famous musicians that have day jobs. It's strange to me that this fact is still a mind blower. Sometimes I wonder if artists being more up front about their earnings would impact file sharing. Something I've noticed is that many people exaggerate what they think musicians earn, which makes it easier to dismiss buying their albums after they download them. What's $15 to an artist who's riding around in a limosine, right? What if you knew he took the bus? To work? Where he gets paid less than you?

Major label culture does a lot to encourage the belief that once you're on the radio or on MTV you're rich and a complete success. It can be good for business, sell albums and attract more fans. And the artists happily go along with it for the same reasons and because it makes them feel good -- nobody wants to be a failure. But it can also trigger a backlash where fans (especially Internet fans) don't want to support you because they've been convinced that you don't need their support.

It makes me think about alternative/industrial bands that I dissed when I was a teenager because I thought they "sold out" when it's pretty clear in retrospect that they were probably just barely scraping by.

I'm guessing that as the label and star system flattens and spreads out (which is already happening gradually) the disparity between fame and big bank accounts will become more obvious.

PayLoadz - "PayLoadz offers a secure Digital Goods eCommerce service for anyone to sell intangible goods online. "

I was making up a batch of album orders today and my CD burner croaked. This is the second burner casualty since starting my whole DIY home burning operation. The last one died back in October '03 so I got a year and change out of it which isn't too bad. But still this is something I hadn't factored into my whole home burning thing and is making me wonder if I've outgrown my ability to do it.

No Australian iTunes For You. This is a drag for me personally because of the recent Brad Sucks Triple J airplay. Hopefully they'll get their act together soon.

Yamaha to Acquire Steinberg - Yamaha buys the makers of Cubase. I wonder what this means for them.

Five Mistakes Band & Label Sites Make is very good, though a bit nerd-centric. I obviously agree with just about everything written there and have been doing it for years. But I also know that most of the music buying public doesn't care about deep linking, RSS, or ID3 tags and they still think a cool looking Flash site is pretty cool looking.

That being said, I think the tips are essential for any indie record label and great for any musician who's thinking about relying on the Internet as a major source of promotion.

Update: Great Metafilter discussion here.

Additional ways to consume and a Japanese feature!

• MSN Music now has my album here. For some reason it only allows full album purchases rather than individual songs, which sucks.
• Apple iTunes is available in Canada now (article), so my fellow Canadians can buy my songs, I assume.
• Brad Sucks is featured featured on Oricon Style, a popular Japanese site.

My email was down over the weekend, so if you sent me something, feel free to resend it.

Fans Rule is a great entry by Scott Andrew about how the number one importance to new bands should be the accumulation of new fans, not worrying about copy protection. I've rambled a lot of similar stuff in the past but Scott's entry is very well written and worth reading.

The iTunes affiliate program is really, really exciting. I've written many times about the need for more DJs, independent radio and general music filter services on the net. Thankfully, MP3 blogs have become hugely popular in the past few months and are still growing at a crazy rate. Now iTunes Affliates can link directly to any songs, albums or artists on iTunes and receive 5% commission on any sales they're responsible for. Meaning that if you were an affiliate and you were to, say, link to my album on iTunes and anyone buys anything, you get 5%. Holy smokes! That's an incentive to promote my music far beyond anything I as a penniless and disorganized independent artist could offer on my own and that's just plain awesome.

So on top of it simply being fun to share music with your friends, you can now make some cash on the side just from people following your recommendations. These are the sorts of innovations and stunts that the digital music industry can pull off which I think will make it an exciting, interesting place, and I think we've only just now started scratching the surface of what can be done.

Also: Looks like even a smart guy like Cringely thinks it's exciting too. And he summarizes it excellently: "This is like sending tens of thousands of record sales people out on the road except that they can sell anything THEY like -- any of the one million iTunes songs -- making them salespeople with real conviction and maybe even with good taste."

Hope everyone who has ordered a CD can bear with me a bit, for some reason I've been having an on and off love affair with strep throat for a month now which has been slowing me down on the "doing anything" front. I'll try to have all orders out by this Friday, sorry for any inconvenience and thanks for buying stuff, that is the best.

I have seen it with my own eyes, Brad Sucks: I Don't Know What I'm Doing is now available on Apple's iTunes service. That's pretty exciting and also totally freaking sweet!

I finally got around to reading this very positive USA Today article on Magnatune, pointed to by Victor and Scott. I've been on Magnatune for just over a month now and I have to say I'm really pleased. I sell about an album a day, which isn't designer clothes money, but it looks like I should be able to afford a couple of pimp cups with my first royalty check, so that's aiight.

I was initially skeptical of Magnatune and basically joined because I felt I had nothing to lose, but I'm glad that I did. It's a very relaxing way to sell records compared to my $5 hand-made, burned and mailed model and it has definitely helped get the Brad Sucks music out there to people who might not have found it otherwise.

I'm real excited to see what'll happen as Magnatune grows and whether my obsessive sales stat checking habit is going to get worse before it gets better.

I've made the pivotal career decision to stay home and play with my new broadband connection rather than go to Songposium. I was kind of interested in going, but I'm even more interested in playing video games online and drinking beer. I truly believe this will be an important weekend for my development as a songwriter nonetheless. Thanks to everyone who offered up their comments on which of my tracks suck the least and also thanks to the crazy guy for his crazy rant from crazy land.

I'm a couple of days late, but apparently Ring Tones Are Bringing in Big Bucks:

The worldwide sale of ring tones, which started as a marketing gimmick for music labels and mobile phone companies, is roughly equivalent to 10 percent of the $32.2 billion global music market.

That's pretty crazy. I wonder if there's a market for original ringtone compositions.

I just got a cell phone a couple of months ago and I just psychologically can't bring myself to spend even a small amount of money on ringtones. And the phone seems to have no facility for importing or creating my own (I was briefly interested in the idea of creating ringtone versions of my own songs), so the whole ringtone phenomenon is kind of dead and bizarre to me.

Notes From the Underground is an interesting article written by a subway musician about his experiences. His list of three suggestions for musicians are: 1. Drop the price of CDs, 2. Branch out and 3. Embrace file-sharing. I more or less agree with all of those and I think have tried to do them all, so hooray, merit points for me. (I still find mostly gay porn when I search for 'brad sucks' on Kazaa or Shareaza though.)

A comment on point #1: after selling a lot of CDs myself at his recommended price of $5, I'm not sure how important that was in selling the CDs. I did it because I just wanted my music out there and realized I could sell my CD at $5 with shipping included and not lose money. I think that's what they call "desperation".

I wish I had a way to know how my CD would have sold if it was $6 or $10 or $20. If I ask, most people deny that they would have paid a penny more, obviously because they'd rather get it for $5 - and I can't blame them. It'd be even better if they could get it for $2.50 or a shiny nickel, but what people want to pay for things and what they actually cost aren't usually the same numbers an economy has told me.

Anyhow, I don't really have a point other than to say after my experiences I'm not convinced the price is all that important. Regular people (ie. non-musicians and other people who don't care about the RIAA) didn't seem too wowed by my $5 price. I was hoping they'd be all "OH MY GOD, FIVE DOLLARS WITH SHIPPING INCLUDED, HOW COULD I *NOT* BUY THIS??" but that hasn't happened much. At times I've gotten the impression that the unusually low price makes them worried they're getting tricked somehow, but the confusion makes it easier to subdue and rob them though, so I guess it all works out.

I got an email from CD Baby over the weekend updating me on the progress of the digital distribution service. Apparently I Don't Know What I'm Doing is up on MusicNet which is AOL's bundled music service. If anyone's on AOL out there and wants to let me know if my stuff actually shows up, that'd be real cool. The list of pending services is pretty nifty: iTunes, Rhapsody, Napster, MusicMatch, BuyMusic, Emusic and AudioLunchbox. Apparently the album has been delivered to most of them so it's just a matter of them sticking it online.

I kind of just bumbled into this digital distribution thing but I'm finding it more and more exciting as time goes on and the world slowly changes. People in real life are talking more and more about various digital music services and having my stuff on there feels somehow like I have snuck infinite copies of my dumb album onto the shelves of some massive international store. And I likes sneakin'.

Jakob from heatstrokerecords.com wrote in to ask about my experience on CD Baby:

I know you use CDBaby for your CDs, and I was wondering, do you think it's worth the upfront cost and the cost per disc? I now own a small independent record label and I was wondering if it would be good to put our current CD in there. We aren't really popular right now, so we're looking for ways to expand our market. Has CDBaby garnered any extra sales for you? How many discs have you sold through CDBaby? Has site traffic increased at all since you started using it? And, granted my position, do you think it'd be worth it for me? Thanks.

The precious answers:

1. CD Baby has garnered only one extra sale that I know of (the person bought the CD from me and told me they found out about me through CD Baby).

2. I have sold zero of the original 5 CDs that I mailed them.

3. I only get the very occasional visitor from my CD Baby page so I'm pretty sure it's done almost nothing for my traffic.

And before I tell you what you should do, let me say that despite how grim that sounds, I'm very happy with CD Baby. CD Baby doesn't promise promotion and I think it would be a mistake to pay them money hoping it will boost your traffic. They just promise to facilitate the selling of your CD, which they do well. I'm even in Tower Records thanks to CD Baby. That combined with the potential of the upcoming digital distribution makes me very happy indeed. These are things I just couldn't have done on my own and it cost me maybe $60 US all said and done for the signup, barcode for digital distribution, shipping and CDs.

You also have to take into account that I undercut them in price ($5 US including shipping here, $6 plus shipping there), I don't have a link to them on my I Don't Know What I'm Doing page (though I should probably add one now that I think of it.) If it was the primary means of getting my album, I'm pretty sure my CD Baby sales would be way higher.

So from the looks of your page you're only offering mail order, which I'd say is a pain in the neck for just about everybody. I'd say either Paypal or CD Baby are your best bets for being able to simplify the process for customers a bit. I think I get away with Paypal okay because I have a pretty net compatible audience, but you may have more non-geeks in your audience who don't know what Paypal is, I have no idea.

Basically if I were you I'd just try to figure out if there are people who want to buy your record but are being scared away by the mail order process. CD Baby (and Paypal) will simplify this process for people. But don't expect getting listed on CD Baby to make your CDs fly off the shelves. The promotion will have to be done by you. Hope that helps!

Had a real nice phone call with John Buckman, the owner of Magnatune tonight regarding my various concerns expressed in this blog entry. I probably can't remember everything we talked about, but I now know that Magnatune is trying very enthusiastically to promote itself and the artists on the label, hence the 50/50 split and the 5 year deal. The 50/50 split is both philisophical (ie. it's a partnership between label and artist) and to cover costs. The 5 year deal is mostly to make sure that when Magnatune prints up compilations and merchandise that the artists don't yank permission away from them, rendering all of that stuff worthless. Which seems pretty understandable to me. He did say something about modifying the contract to 1 year either from now on or upon the artist's request, I can't remember due to being partially brain dead.

He told me they're most likely going to put a list of the latest promotional/marketing events and items online so that while nothing will be guaranteed contractually, the fussy worried artists like me can have a better understanding of what's been going on in Magnatune promotion-wise and understand the situation a bit better and why you're agreeing to some of the things you're agreeing to. I think that's a pretty good idea.

John explained the Creative Commons to me a bit and I think I feel slightly less confused. I at least got the impression he understands it and that it's somehow useful in licensing, so that seems all right by me.

He confirmed the concerns about the non-exclusive deal keeping artists from signing an exclusive deal but added two very good points: a) Major labels are very accustomed to not owning the previous recordings of artists. Like Nirvana and Sub Pop, etc. and b) Unlike indie labels, Magnatune doesn't own the songs of the artist, the artist has just licensed those particular recordings to them for a period of time. So if for some reason you can't work something out with Magnatune and the major label, you're within your rights to re-record the album and then you have exclusive control over that recording. With an indie, they own the songs and you are total-E boned.

Anyhow, I'm sure there was more and I hope I didn't get any of the things he said wrong. Basically in a nutshell: John seemed like a real good guy with a lot of cool ideas and a passion for what he's doing. I'm really looking forward to being on board and helping out in any way I can. Also he and his wife said nice things about my music and anyone who likes my music is OK by me.

Got another friendly email this morning from CD Baby. It's looking like digital distribution for my album I Don't Know What I'm Doing is getting closer and closer. So far I've had to buy a barcode for my album and today I had to get ISRC codes for the songs on the album, whatever those are. They were free though and they look like this: us-hm8-03-09972 (that's for Making Me Nervous). The impression I get is that CD Baby is saving me from doing a lot of stupid paperwork and for that I heart them. If my stuff actually shows up on all these services I never use that would be super sweet as well.