There was a very interesting article about digital distribution that I had read by way of www.cnet.com. The article spoke about potential problems that some starts up companies have faced in trying to distribute music online, and there were some good suggestions on how to improve it. According to Matt Rosoff, a service called Speak Heart allows artists to sell songs through the service’s digital store, and the artist has complete pricing discretion.
This pricing discretion is good on one hand, but on the other hand, the service keeps 25 cents per song sold by the artist. Another problem with a start up service like this one is that most mainstream artists already have their own distribution; so many unknown artists will continue to live in obscurity without any recognition (Rosoff, 2008). Most of these unknown artists are not able to build a fan base online, because their not being given the exposure that they need to break in.
A good suggestion that Rosoff mentioned about was to possibly have a mainstream artist featured on the site to help bring traffic. I believe this is probably what CDBaby and some other services have possibly done to breakthrough with unknown artists. Another service called eMusic had an advantage over Speak Heart, because it has been around for over 10 years already. Speak Heart was really knew, so the uphill battle for recognition was probably pretty steep.
The author mentioned some good advice for beginner artists that are trying to build their fan base. He said “ if you’re a beginning artist, I still think the best recipe for success is to give full downloadable samples away on your home page or MySpace, then sell your music through a service like CDBaby or Tune Core” (Rosoff, 2008). I am not sure how many artists have really taken heed to this kind of advice, but I believe it would help a lot of unknown artists become mainstream much easier.
Source:www.news.cnet.com/8301-13526-_3-9887085-27.html
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