Shaun Groves
I had a great meeting this morning with a guy whose company is trying to change the way the music fan and the musician interact, and the way musicians make money. What they’re doing is this…
They’re building digital music stores for artists that contain that artist’s music, that artists’ music plus a certain catalog of music, or that artist’s music plus all the same music you could buy at iTunes. The artist sets the price of his music and also makes money when another artist’s music is purchased from his store.
It’s not just artists who can build a store like this. Anyone can. TV shows are beginning to run stores. Very well-known household goods stores and even restaurants as well.
And the best part is that the price of a download can be as low as free, the artist makes far more than they do going through iTunes, AND once the song is downloaded by a consumer it can be passed along without restriction…if the store’s operator lifts all restrictions.
One thought I’ve had is starting a store and giving the profits to Compassion International. I own thepeacestore.org but nothing’s there right now. Why not make peace (fix what’s broken) by sending profits from digital music sales to folks who educate, clothe, feed and teach kids about Jesus? Looking into it. The price at the moment is a little high.
Another thing he’s doing is creating a widget that searches your hard drive’s music stash and brings up all the upcoming concert info for artists you already listen to sorted by a given date range, geographical range, etc. An artist will, in time, be able to upload their concert info at the widget’s home site. Right now the widget only tracks artists tracked by Pollstar. In time though this widget could be embedded into myspace pages, blog sidebars etc and fans could then know whenever I’m coming to their city and share that with their blog’s readers. It’s a viral tour page that’s constantly updating itself and searchable.
Anyway, my head is spinning from all the cool new ideas coming down the pipe from this company. I’ll let you know more when I learn more. I’m a guinea pig for these guys now I think. They really want to help me grow my audience so that more kids can be saved through Compassion International at my concerts. Here’s hoping it works.
How many of you shop on-line for music? How do you currently find out if your favorite artists are coming to your town?
keith says:
Great idea about the viral tour page widget! The problem is: I don’t know when my favorite artists are coming to town, because I don’t take the time to go to all of their webpages to check their tour dates. I’ve thought about chucking all of my email privacy issues to the wind and signing up for everyone’s news letter, but haven’t taken the time to do that either.
Grovesfan says:
I don’t usually purchase music online because I like the liner notes, etc. May begin to though as my kids do it more frequently. I find out about concerts the old fashioned way, radio, print ads, artist website. Or, I call Brody and say “hey, I need a concert. Set something up huh??
Beth
Taylor Smith says:
As a software designer by day / music minister by weekend, I can atest to this being HUGE. I love the idea of the widget, very Web 2.0. The internet is becoming more and more about customized and strategically funnelled information to the end user. It sounds like this company is on the right track.
As to buying music online, I purchase the occational hard to find album online, but I like my CDs due to the lack of DRM. However, it seems that itunes will start selling DRM-free tracks soon and it seems that these guys are too. Good stuff if you ask me.
Shaun Groves says:
These download will have no DRM. Bonus.
erin says:
I love buying music online because that’s one less CD I have to keep track of, and if I only like a few songs, I can just buy those and not the whole album. I also have a Rhapsody subscription, so I can preview albums before I buy them. I honestly don’t care if I ever buy another CD again.
As for tour dates, I just periodically check the MySpace pages of the artists I’m interested in, usually only to find out that they came to my area last week or the week before. I am a member of a few online newsletters, but I don’t want to do that for every band I’m a fan of. The widget sounds really cool.
shaunfan says:
Like Beth, I’m also a CD collector for liner notes and for the cool links and extras, like DVD’s, that come with them. And due to digital downloads cutting into CD sales, the price per CD is getting more attractive. Case in point, “One Night in Knoxville” for $10 for 17 tracks is a better deal than $.99 per song. The Third Day anthology CD/DVD with 17 music tracks and a full-length DVD is $14.99. Also a better deal. On the other hand, the Nichole Nordeman Hits CD is $17.99 and only includes 2 new tracks and I own all of her CD’s, so I just downloaded the 2 new tracks only for $1.98. And FFH put out a greatest hits with no new tracks so nothing from me.
As for downloads in general, I’ve downloaded about 200 songs and I have over 15,000 songs on my iPod. My main issue was the DRM restrictions so I’ll probably be more open to downloading soon.
As for concert notices, I subscribe to notices for about 30 artists on iTickets (Christian) and another 20 secular artists on ticketmaster. Just so you know, I’ve gotten about 10 e-mails from iTickets about your music cruise next month so even though I won’t be there this time (8 month old baby), it won’t be for lack of notice.
Widgets sound cool though as I’m getting notices on 50 artists and I have over 2,000 artists in my library.