Keep It on the Download

Sep 1, 2001 12:00 PM, By Markkus Rovito

The Internet hasn't crashed. What has crashed is the notion of a gold rush in which any half-baked Internet startup with a sketchy business model can secure millions in venture capital and sit back to wait for a monumental IPO. Never mind profitability; the Internet's popularity is as high as ever, especially among young, tech-savvy, and music-hungry people. What's more, the Internet is on the verge of expanding its user base as it migrates to devices less expensive than the PC, such as TVs and game consoles.

That's encouraging for those who want to promote their music online. The Internet provides simple and cost-effective ways of getting your music heard, promoting gigs, and keeping in touch with fans, as well as finding new ones. However, just as a mediocre business model and a Web site do not equal fast wealth and early retirement, a few demo MP3s and a band photo online won't start a label bidding war. Successful music promotion on the Internet takes hard work; a little luck; and, above all, your best music.

In the heady cyberspace daydreams of the late 1990s, the Internet was supposed to function as the great equalizer so unsigned bands could snatch a piece of the rock-star pie away from corporate-approved icons. A small army of Web sites cropped up to help facilitate the power shift by hosting unsigned artists' MP3 files for download. Most sites offer each act a home page and a concise URL with MP3 downloads, streaming audio, images, biographies, gig listings, and CD sales. Although any of that can be accomplished — with a greater amount of customization — on a personally maintained Web site, most third-party music sites are free and have regular users who might otherwise never visit your site.

Although a smattering of the thousands of artists who patronize those sites have gone on to sign record deals, compose music for film and TV, or somehow make a living in music, the dream of knocking the major labels from their pedestals remains unfulfilled. The majors may be wobbling a bit from their inability to stifle or control online music distribution, but the Internet cash crunch has taken its toll on the third-party sites as well. Recently, some players in downloadable music have either choked (Riffage.com) or faltered (IUMA.com disappeared only to be revived by Vitaminic). Whether the survivors will succeed in playing Robin Hood to the arrogant major-label powers that be or starve from the profitlessness of their goodwill remains to be seen. In the meantime, the amount of fertile breeding ground for your music online is too good to pass up. I checked out eight third-party music sites to see what they have to offer musicians and how they stack up against each other (see the table, “The Site Scene.”)

LOCK AND LOAD

Uploading music was surprisingly simple with almost all of the third-party sites that I tested. Depending on the speed of your Internet connection and on the lengths you go to to describe your band and music, you can complete the registration and uploading process for some sites in a matter of minutes. Nevertheless, your page will not appear for two to ten days.

After filling out the requisite personal information, you will most likely be presented with a lengthy contract. Not to worry. They are not deals with the devil that give away the rights to your music. The long-winded contracts say what you want and need them to say: you agree to have your music posted online, you retain ownership and copyright of your music, and so on. In addition, all agreements are nonexclusive, meaning you have the right to put your songs on as many Web sites as you like, and you can take them offline whenever you choose. Also, most sites prohibit the uploading of cover songs, though RollingStone.com allows it as long as you attribute the song to the original artist. A few sites offer DAM (digital automatic music) CDs. On those sites, artists can create DAM CDs from MP3s of their songs. When an order is placed for the DAM CD, the site presses and mails out the disc, keeping a portion of the sale and giving the rest to the artist. That is a nice way around having to maintain an inventory of CDs, and you can create and update your DAM CDs as you add tracks to your repertoire.

IUMA. Making its first appearance in 1993, the Internet Underground Music Archive (IUMA; www.iuma.com) was one of the first third-party sites. Originality usually garners respect in the music world, which is one reason IUMA holds a reputation as an innovator. Statements from IUMA such as “IUMA is the one place to post your music where actual musicians are watching out for you — not weasels watching the numbers” also lend the site a musician-friendly vibe. It's not just talk, either; two days after I posted a phony band page sloppily thrown together for this column, IUMA sent a detailed e-mail offering suggestions about improving the page to attract repeat visitors. No other Web site responded that way.

IUMA shut down briefly earlier this year only to be acquired and revived by fellow third-party Web site Vitaminic. At press time, IUMA had not yet reinstated its artist CD sales but was planning to do so shortly. Artists who press their CDs can send them to IUMA to be sold from the site. IUMA then takes care of billing and fulfillment of CD sales and keeps a $5 consignment fee from the artist-determined CD price. IUMA pays artists their portion of CD revenue quarterly, and users can check their sales, page views, downloads, and streaming-audio statistics daily. Artists' IUMA pages are also highly customizable; available options include a large selection of background colors, font colors, button graphics, and rotating JPEG images. Users can also list their music in as many as four of the 40 available musical genres.

Ad-revenue sharing as a way of paying artists dropped after the relaunch, but IUMA users may benefit from the increased exposure to European listeners that Vitaminic brings.

Vitaminic. With sites for nine European countries and one for the United States, Vitaminic (www.vitaminic.com) claims to be the most popular site in Europe for downloadable music. Although it's still vying for mass recognition stateside, Vitaminic offers some nice, unique features for unsigned artists. First, you can create a band page for any European Vitaminic site, but the company does not offer translation services. You may also choose to sell downloads of MP3 tracks. The minimum price per MP3 is 99 cents, and Vitaminic keeps 50 percent of song sales. It also keeps 50 percent of sales of DAM CDs that it creates using your album art. The company pays artists quarterly as long as the amount due is $50 or more.

Listeners can use streaming audio to hear your uploaded songs at no cost, but beyond that, you designate whether the MP3 download is free, for sale, or for fans only. Potential listeners must register to your e-mail list to download fan-only songs. That basically creates a fan club, and Vitaminic lets you send mass e-mails to everyone on your list. Vitaminic hosts pages for signed established acts as well, which drives site traffic.

MP3.com. The most famous of the third-party sites — for all its high-profile legal battles — MP3.com (www.mp3.com) is also becoming the most infamous for being the first to charge artists monthly fees and to sell perks. Basic services are still free, but $19.99 a month buys Premium Artist Services, which include eligibility for the Payback for Playback (P4P) program, priority placement in search results, and more control of your page. The total dollar amount MP3.com pays artists in P4P money is capped at $1 million a month, which, unfortunately, means that the more artists who join Premium Services, the more each artist's share per download decreases.

The most suspect of MP3.com's practices are the auctioning off of payola songs that receive special placement on search pages and the selling of other perks to the highest bidder. The fact that bids in some auctions reach many hundreds of dollars must mean that exposure on MP3.com is effective, and the site can't be blamed for taking advantage of its online real estate. Still, the auctions give MP3.com an air of impenetrability for the starving musicians trying to level the promotional playing field, and there's the sense that maybe some of the music industry's corporate slime is oozing from the major labels into cyberspace.

However, MP3.com's free services are more than adequate, and it's hard to argue against the site's brand recognition and 10 million unique visitors a month. The company also manufactures DAM CDs of artists' uploaded songs, which they can sell from their pages. Musicians set the CD prices and can sell as many different albums as they want. They receive 50 percent of the proceeds after MP3.com takes a $3.99 fee for production and order-fulfillment costs. The company also sells netCDs, which consist of the same songs as MP3 downloads. The price of netCDs is the same as the cost of the DAM CDs minus the $3.99 production cost, and again, the artist receives 50 percent of the sale.

PeopleSound. Although the Web site claiming to be Great Britain's most popular music download page is an attractive and useful tool (www.peoplesound.com), musicians from the United States could likely be put off by PeopleSound's mail-in registration page that must be printed and sent to London along with hard copies of photos to be scanned for the site. Despite that absurdity, PeopleSound has advantages. Owned by EMI, PeopleSound's A&R team works to find deals for member artists, including licensing tracks for film, TV, and other media. Popular British media outlets such as New Music Express (NME) and Music Week publish PeopleSound's weekly charts from the site's 80 genres. The site offers many help and advice sections, and members receive a 25 percent discount off Beatnik sample CDs. PeopleSound also produces DAM CDs for musicians to sell off-site. Artists receive 50 percent of each CD sale minus British sales tax and a £2 production cost.

RollingStone.com. RollingStone.com's third-party music site (www.rollingstone.com) is light on special features, offering just the basics: multiple MP3 hosting, a band JPEG, biography, announcements, listener ratings, and so on. It offers no direct CD sales; instead, you may link to another Web site that sells your CDs. A big selling point for RollingStone.com is that a Rolling Stone editor reviews one MP3 per day. The competition is fierce, however, so don't put all your eggs in that basket.

EarBuzz. This wild-card site (www.earbuzz.com) takes a slightly different approach to the third-party music-site scheme. It is primarily for artists who have CDs to sell online but who want a third-party service to take care of the billing and fulfillment. Users pay a $45 annual fee and send CDs to earBuzz. The artist then gets a page on earBuzz.com with images, info, one full MP3 track from the CD, and several clips from other tracks. The artist sets the price for each CD and keeps the proceeds, minus a 3 percent credit card fee. The company also does unique promotions for its artists, such as regional shows featuring earBuzz member bands.

Live365. More of an Internet radio portal than a third-party music site, Live365 (www.live365.com) is home to more than 37,000 online radio stations. Musicians can start a personal radio station on which they can loop as many as three hours of their MP3 songs 24/7. As the songs play, a player window that provides track information pops up in the listener's browser. The player window can also provide Buy buttons that link to sites from which the music can be purchased.

Broadjam. The newest service on the block, Broadjam (www.broadjam.com), has a unique set of services and features intended to help artists gain exposure quickly. Broadjam has three levels of membership. The first two levels, Quick 10 and Club 10, are free. The Quick 10 lets listeners review and rate tracks. Listener feedback is sent directly to artists, who are automatically notified when someone reviews their songs. Artists also receive notice if one of their tracks makes it onto a top ten list. Club 10 is the basic level tailored for musicians. It offers a page on the site and room for three songs. One of the requirements is that artists must review three other songs on the site for every song they post.

The highest service level, Musicians of Broadjam (MOB), is available for an annual fee of $50. For the MOB price, Broadjam registers eight of the artist's songs on its site, provides a Broadjam e-mail account and e-mail distribution service for press releases and fan lists, and disseminates five songs to other music sites. Broadjam distributes to the most active sites on the Web, and the list is updated frequently as new sites gain prominence and old sites disappear.

OUT OF SITE

As nice as it would be to recommend one third-party music site that is best suited to hosting your MP3 music, most sites have at least one unique feature. Considering that the investment of time and money required to establish a presence on most sites is negligible, take a blanket approach to promoting your music on third-party Web sites. Cover all the bases that make sense. If you don't have CDs pressed, bypass earBuzz in favor of MP3.com, Vitaminic, or another site that produces CDs. If you don't have enough material to justify creating a radio station, check out IUMA or another site on which your tunes may end up on the company's Internet radio stations.

Getting your music online through third-party Web sites is so easy that if you're not doing it, you may as well be singing out of key into a paper-cup microphone. Do yourself a couple of favors: get a high-speed Internet connection and start filling servers with your music today.

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Markkus Rovito vaguely remembers life before DSL. He is a senior editor for E-Gear, a bedroom musician, and a contributor to Remix, an EM sister publication. E-mail him at mrovito@earthlink.net.

THE SITE SCENE

Here is an overview of the services offered by the eight third-party music sites covered in this story. Ratings are given for each site's ease of use, pay structure, and search function on a scale of 0 to 10, with 10 being the highest rating.

	Broadjam	earBuzz	IUMA	Live365	MP3	People Sound	Rolling Stone	Vitaminic
Image Hosting	yes	yes	yes	no	yes	yes	yes	yes
Customizable Pages	yes	no	yes	no	yes	no	no	no
Streaming Audio	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes
Gig Listings	yes	no	yes	no	yes	no	yes	yes
Daily Statistics	no	yes	yes	no	yes	yes	yes	yes
Listener Comments	yes	no	yes	no	yes	yes	yes	no
CD Sales	no	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes	no	yes
Individual Song Sales	no	no	no	no	no	no	no	yes
Radio	yes	no	yes	yes	yes	yes	no	no
Personal URL	yes	yes	yes	no	yes	no	yes	yes
Fee-based Premium Services	yes	no	no	no	yes	no	no	no
Ease of Use	9	7	9	7	8	5	9	8
Pay Structure	n/a	9	8	n/a	7	6	n/a	9
Search Function	9	9	9	8	7	7	6	10
Best Feature	distributes songs to other music sites	highest recoupment from CD sales	indie cred	creates your own personal Internet radio station	most recognizable name	weekly charts published in top media outlets	possible review by Rolling Stone editor	can create your own page for 9 European countries
Weakest Link	unproven track record	little name recognition	rocky past and uncertain future	top MP3 quality is 56 Kbps	sells prime placement of music to the highest bidder	mail-in sign up form	is the lottery ticket of online promotion	bland artist pages