Tunecore Beta

Barely a year ago, indie musicians who were looking around to get digital distribution such as Itunes for their music didn’t have too many options. I remember when Apple first started pushing Itunes for the independent labels they even stated in their press release that they were only going to let the “major” indies (Matador, Merge, etc.) participate.

Fast forward to today and you can see the start of a heated battle between companies who are competing to serve as a “middleman” between Itunes and independent musicians whose music otherwise wouldn’t get the time of day on such services. Some of the companies already in the hunt are IODA, CDBaby and The Orchard, all of who claim to have the best distribution channels and the best deals as far as the percentage they take for each Itunes or digital file sold.

I saw a newcomer in the digital distribution fray the other day whose price model is pretty intriguing to say the least. The company, whose service is in beta currently, is called Tunecore. Basically, you get 100% of the amount that you make from the sale of any songs on Itunes or any other of their music partners (Rhapsody is the only other service currently besides Itunes). I’ve been researching digital distribution for a number of indie bands so this was very interesting.

So what’s the catch? Well, the details are that you pay 99 cents per album track to have a song listed on Itunes U.S. This is important because listing on other regional Itunes stores like Itunes Japan, as well as listing on Rhapsody costs an extra 99 cents… but per ALBUM. That’s still not bad. However, there is an annual upkeep fee of $7.98 for each album.

Therein, is my only sticking point so far. In order to keep your album listed in the various music services you need to pay that fee for each album every year. And the problem is that there is nothing saying that fee won’t be increased later. Otherwise, $7.98 seems like a fairly cheap way to keep your album out there digitally. I’d like to see an “all-you-can-eat” fee option for labels who want to have a bunch of albums listed (well, in fact I noticed that they say to contact them for details on bundling 7 or more albums in their service).

One thing that is pretty nice about the Tunecore service is that it is “non-exclusive”, so that you aren’t forced to stay with them if you decide you’d rather try one of the other services. They are also looking at providing distribution on other music stores like Emusic and Yahoo Music. It also doesn’t hurt that the CEO is Jeff Price, one of the co-founders of the indie record label spinART.

In any case, you may want to look at other options first. I know that CDBaby does the same service for a flat fee of $35 and has more stores currently. Also, you can go the digital route in conjunction with physical CDs through them, which could be attractive for those who don’t already distribute their CDs physically. However, they do take a cut of everything sold (I believe 9%), and they DO require exclusivity, and also I believe they make you buy a barcode for $20 if you don’t have it. From a pure money standpoint I’d guess it would mostly depend on how many digital tracks you think you’d sell per year. I think it is something like:

CDbaby = $35 flat (plus potential $20 barcode) plus 9% of sales/per year
Tunecore = $.99 times number of tracks plus $7.98 flat/per year

Of course, for Tunecore it also depends on whether or not you want to put the song in other stores… that would be an extra buck per store per album. The math makes my head hurt this early in the morning, so you probably want to go look at their site yourself:

Tunecore Website

by Bryan