Twitter fight! Twitter fight!

@zedshaw: @tunecoregary Holy crap man, write a blog post. Did you seriously message me that much today?

I recently had a long, occasionally sarcastic discussion on Twitter with Zed Shaw. Zed is a famously iconoclastic developer best known for creating the web server software Mongrel, that TuneCore and thousands of other websites use every day. He's a very, very smart guy, and lately he's been getting into music. He has some typically iconoclastic thoughts about how artists can sell their music directly, here, here and here.

This led to some spirited tweets between me (@tunecoregary) and @zedshaw. It got verbose, so he asked me to write a blog post. Voila. Here's a response to just a few points from the entries at the URLs above. Zed's right in several areas but way off in others.

What’s needed is a mechanism for a musician (or any artist) to put their music on their site, and then let a fan click a button to buy it. Wow, revolutionary right? A widget that plays some music, and then has a link to where you can buy the music. Gee, that sounds kinda hard, I wonder if I could do it.

We're doing that right now, except the links go to iTunes, where the music is already hosted, and they handle payment and download. That's got its plusses and minuses, everyone knows it. So maybe artists could go direct. Enormous questions about the specific mechanisms of payment (is it PayPal?), fulfillment (is it streams, downloads, partials, unlocks, what happens when a download/stream is interrupted?), copyright (there's incredible legal exposure here at all levels, who's responsible?) or quality issues/returns--those are questions merely at the selling end, what about the accounting end? But forget about all that and about the demands of artists and fans (who always want choices, choices) for a moment.

Direct sales are definitely possible, it's true. Artists have sold their CDs out of the trunks of cars at their shows for years. Selling direct off your own website is kind of like that. I expect most artists would still rather get into stores where more customers are. Since the Towers, Sam Goodys and Virgin Megastores of the world have collapsed or are on life support, those stores are now digital. It is true that they act as "walled gardens," where you search and browse only among music that has been hosted on those sites' digital shelves. Part of why we founded TuneCore was to stock the infinite shelf space of iTunes and Amazon so full of independents that it would lower those walls as much as possible. So far, that's working pretty well.

I would love for TuneCore widgets to offer direct sales to customers and allow artists to set their own pricing and completely bypass the stores such as iTunes. Unfortunately that is rife with a number of details around fulfillment and copyright that will take some time to work out. It's not as simple as an XSPF file and a few lines of Python.

As soon as there’s good search engines for music, and a good browser for music that does not honor walled garden we’ll see a massive change in the business. First to go will be these middle men...

If "middlemen" are not nimble enough to cope with the rapidly changing field, that is correct. If they truly are the "middlemen" that Zed believes us to be. If pushing files and pulling a cut of the cash was all they did, just maybe Zed might be right. However, if they provide a useful range of services and charge a fair price for it, they will survive. Further, someone who builds the search engine will become a new middleman (because of Google, SEO is a huge business) and whoever builds the browser software will probably do okay as well, in influence if not revenue (such as Firefox improving web standards compliance). And someone like TuneCore with a nice tidy place for artists to accumulate payments and host artists' assets and offer one-click or easy distribution to new venues will do just fine.

Zed also says this:

For whatever reason, Amazon caved to the labels, and in order to get the right to sell f---ing Britney Spears songs, Amazon probably agreed to cut out any potential competitors to the current business model.

That's not true. The sale of music online is rife with copyright issues, fraud and worse. This is the law, not the opinions of labels (granted, the labels had a lot of opinion on the writing of the law in the first place). TuneCore regularly pulls down albums that have been proven to contain uncleared samples or other stolen work. Most online stores have enough on their plate with customers. Stores aren't interested in dealing with hundreds of thousands of individual artists. They'd much prefer to let us do that. They love us, and we make their jobs easier. Why would they go direct and have to build that overhead of support and management? They'd have to charge more off the back end and the artist would make LESS money.

I'm paraphrasing, but Zed strongly implies that people like TC add little or nothing to the production chain and take revenue illegitimately, either up front or back end. That makes me sad. Zed apparently doesn't understand that a good distributor provides a useful service to artists, and he makes it clear he feels the sooner we can be cut out of the chain the better. As someone who has spent the last three years of his life helping artists earn money from their work, I have to respond. TuneCore provides label-like services without the traditional "sign here and give us your rights forever and the bulk of your earnings forever" handcuff model. TuneCore is most definitely NOT a label, or a "middleman." I built this company to be the good guys of the music business and I still believe strongly in that.

Another point: Zed may be right in that a cheaper competitor to TC might come along, even now there's some, but since when is "cheaper" the same as "better"? Eventually the digital music distribution space is going to be like web hosting - full of fly-by-night companies who offer cheaper and cheaper rates for no-frills service--because there's demand, and demand creates lots of different models. But then it's up to TuneCore to provide value for money. This is true of any business.

As for distribution channels and walled gardens: iTunes and Amazon MP3 are on the top of the heap right now, but that will not always be the case. TC will adapt to work with whatever new model comes along. I always conceived of TuneCore's distribution as agnostic, not dependent on iTunes or Amazon or eMusic or anyone. I'd love to seed torrents of artists' music to promote themselves, if thats what they want. We'd be happy to offer more streaming, or on demand CD printing, or direct sales via widget where the artist sets the price point. All that stuff is great, and we're working on as much as possible. But it has to be sensitive to a lot more than just the mechanics of moving the file, grabbing the cash and walking away. It's just not that simple, and the complexities are precisely where a PARTNER is just what's needed. If it's a fair partner, and a smart one, and a knowledgeable one, why not use them?

Here's to your success as a working musician.

Comments

[Straight-P]

I love Tunecore. I just HATE waiting 3 months for me to show up on iTunes Radar while the Majors get same day release?!?!?!?

wack

[Matt]

We looked into building a similar service a couple of years ago. Since then, Snocap has popped up, which pretty much does the same thing. It's a bit superior to bandcamp in my opinion, in that it provides a widget that you can embed in an existing site, which is super simple for non-techie users. The player is branded as Snocap, but that's about it. It's a great additional service for people that also use Tunecore, since it's essentially just an additional market. I don't see the two as mutually exclusive, more complementary.

[Sylvia Heins]

I don't know. I own my own music player & with all respect to TuneCore, I'd rather sell my music using paypal and my own special secret method..

[Randy]

Listen I would love to just do my music upload to a place and let them take care of the legalities, and pay me my money. That way I can concentrate on music, and promotions.

[Steven Cravis]

As long as you give the customer choices for how THEY want to buy it, all is well.
-Steven Cravis
http://www.stevencravis.com

[Mike]

Anybody could post password protected music downloads and set up a paypal button which would give the buyer the password to download the file. I sell my own music online, and I think this is a moot point. Let's use the old brick-and-mortar, CD paradigm as an example: Artists want their CDs to be in the same place as the other artists, like being on the shelf next to The Beatles at the Virgin Megastore. If you only sold CDs at your gigs and not in the major stores, you'd reach less people and have less sales. Now let's go to today. Any artist who is serious about selling their music today, is going to want to sell it everywhere they can. 1. on their website 2. at their gigs 3. on the big store sites, and 4. in the brick-and-mortar stores. Right?

[Bruce Warila]

Gary,

I guess if you look at the iTunes cut on a $1,000,000 in revenue, $300,000 is a boatload of money for the service Apple provides.

However for most artists, forking over $300 on $1,000 in annual revenue (or, $30 on $100 for most artists); given what iTunes provides it's not a bad deal.

As far as TuneCore goes, you can't beat the flat fees.

Zed's barking up the wrong tree (it seems to me). The battle is not won or lost on the gross profit anyone generates on 99 cent downloads. Moreover, the price of music is headed down, not up.

The battle will be (is) fought over access to the 10,000 mass-exposure opportunities that come up every year. From radio playlist slots, to festival slots, to network television exposure slots (including ads). Access to this relationship-based business is where the 'man' is holding everyone else down.

Distribution and Point of sale are yesterday's problems. Mass-market exposure is the playing field that has to be leveled now.

[Pete]

Interesting discussion. There is a already great service out there for artists who want to sell their own downloads: bandcamp.com - I like it better than the tunecore widget for a few reasons:

* The widget carries no branding, and your pages can be customized to fit in with your site

* Bandcamp allows "set your own price" sales (and even "free in exchange for email" sales), as well as fixed pricing and free downloads. iTunes charges too much for my songs (sells them "album only")

* Multiple formats of downloads

As far as the middleman being unnecessary... sort of a moot point if you want access to the major stores. I think Tunecore has the best deal going for digital distribution, and I hope you'll continue to take the lead in features and customer service.

[Tim]

Great Blog! Definitely on the same page as you with this statement - "I built this company to be the good guys of the music business and I still believe strongly in that." There are too many businesses who are in it primarily for the benjamins, not to help artists, so it's good to see another company who is artist-friendly.

[Andrew]

Great insights into some of the behind-the-scenes issues that today's music businesses are dealing with.

Love: "...because there's demand, and demand creates lots of different models. But then it's up to TuneCore to provide value for money. This is true of any business." Right on!

[Lee]

damn... good fight! = )