Jeff Price is the Founder and CEO of TuneCore
A
TuneCore Artist named Drake used TuneCore to distribute his music about
14 days ago. Since then, he has sold over 300,000 copies of his
single “Best I Ever Had”.
As far as I can tell, Drake is the best selling unsigned artist of all
time. Congratulations Drake! (In an ironic twist, Drake did a deal
with Universal about 10 days after he used TuneCore to distribute his
music).
This also goes to show how confused things are out there in the world.
“Unsigned” artists selling more songs than signed artists is becoming
more of the rule than the exception. Artists selling less music are
making more money then signed artists. Many Artists, using social
networking sites, a video uploaded to YouTube and their Facebook page,
are becoming more popular then artists getting hundreds of thousands of
marketing dollars put behind them. Without playing a single gig, some
bands are selling more music than bands that have been touring for
months.
Media outlets, newspapers like the New York Times, aren’t even sure how
to talk about what is going on. The best selling Music Downloads chart
in the Monday, June 29th New York Times Business Section shows Drake
charting at #4 (between Sean Kingston and Lady Gaga) and mistakenly
lists TuneCore as the record label. TuneCore is such a new/unique
concept that they don’t know how to even refer to us. But that’s the
point, things are changing so rapidly that the traditional tried and
true charts are now wrong and there is uncertainty as to what the chart
represents.
Take for example the TuneCore Artist Nevershoutnever. When he was
still “unsigned” (he is now signed to Warner) he sold hundreds of
thousands of songs in a 45 day period off of a collection of EPs /demos
and, in a six month period, over 30,000 t-shirts through the regional
Hot Topic program. By my calculation, based on the number of songs he
sold across his releases, he is outselling many of the Billboard Top 40
artists. So what is it the Billboard charts now represent? They
certainly do not represent fame as there are a LOT of very famous bands
that sell out huge gigs but sell very few albums. It does not represent
wealth as artists can make money in a multitude of ways; from
endorsement deals to gig income, merch sales, etc. It does not
represent the best sellers as music fans buy songs from an artist
across a swatch of releases as opposed to just one group of songs from
one album.
So what does the Billboard chart represent? And what criteria should
be put together to create new charts that reflect more of what is going
on in the world.
The fundamental reality is this: some TuneCore Artists are selling more
music, making more money and becoming more popular than the artists
that appear in the charts. If there is going to continue to be a chart
that is supposed to reflect the “Top” bands (not even sure what that
means) it MUST take into consideration the way the world is working.
Many small start-up companies and the non-music people running them
have taken a stab at creating their own charts – a random and
nonsensical combination or how many MySpace friends, how many free
streams your widget gets combined with some “weighted average” of your
songs sales and a proprietary system that has some magic formula that
spits out some answer. This could not be further off the mark. Charts
should reflect what artists are “popular”, the problem is, popularity
used to be tied directly into how many copies an artist’s album sold,
and this is a dying, if not already dead, model. Perhaps the answer
is popularity means people are willing to pay you for your art in some
way
I honestly don’t have the answer (yet) but I do know that we are indeed living in amazing times!
Share your thoughts here on the TuneCore blog.
