Tag Archive for 'free music'

Free! Why $0.00 Is The Future Of Business: Cross-Subsidies

Published
by
Rob Stefaniak
on February 25, 2008
in Management
. 0 Comments

Free StickerIn this months WIRED (16.03), editor Chris Anderson (author of The Long Tail) pens a great article on why the future of business will be founded on providing goods and services for FREE.

An example of how live performance revenues subsidize recorded music revenue is brought forth using a Brazilian band called Banda Calypso that self-distributes masters of its CDs and CD liner art to local street vendor networks in towns it plans to tour. They have full agreement and expectation that the vendors will copy the CDs, sell them, and keep all the money. They allow this because selling recorded music isn’t their main source of revenue. The band recognizes they are actually in the live performance business. And business is apparently really good for them - they tour and travel from town-to-town via private jet.

In addition, the use of the street vendors for distribution generates more ’street cred’ for Banda Calypso in every town they visit. Their omnipresence in the urban soundscape means they get huge crowds to their rave/dj/concert events. Free music is just publicity for a far more lucrative tour business. Nobody thinks of this as piracy.

Free Prince CD

Last July, Prince debuted his new album, Planet Earth, by stuffing a copy — retail value $19 — into 2.8 million issues of the Sunday edition of London’s Daily Mail. (The paper often includes a CD, but this was the first time it featured all-new material from a star.) How can a platinum artist give away a new release? And how can a newspaper distribute it free of charge?

A) Prince spurred ticket sales. Strictly speaking, the artist lost money on the deal. He charged the Daily Mail a licensing fee of 36 cents a disc rather than his customary $2. But he more than made up the difference in ticket sales. The Purple One sold out 21 shows at London’s 02 Arena in August, bringing him record concert revenue for the region.

B) The Daily Mail boosted its brand. The freebie bumped up the newspaper’s circulation 20 percent that day. That brought in extra revenue, but not enough to cover expenses. Still, Daily Mail execs consider the giveaway a success. Managing editor Stephen Miron says the gimmick worked editorially and financially: “Because we’re pioneers, advertisers want to be with us.”

How Can A CD Be Free? – WIRED 16.03

Free! Why $0.00 Is The Future Of Business – WIRED 16.03

How To: Make Money Around Free Content @ WIRED How-To Wiki

—————-
Now playing: Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova - Falling Slowly
via FoxyTunes

Up Close: RCRD LBL Co-Founder And CEO Peter Rojas — FMQB

Published
by
Rob Stefaniak
on February 25, 2008
in Management
. 2 Comments

RCRD LBLFMQB (Friday Morning Quarterback), a publication servicing radio programming and management executives, as well as music industry executives, recently interviewed RCRD LBL co-founder Peter Rojas.

RCRD LBL is an online record label releasing exclusive and completely free music from emerging and established artists. In addition to their in-house label, the RCRD LBL network includes a curated roster of independent record labels offering free MP3 downloads and multimedia content in blog format.

Peter Rojas came out of the blog world where he founded the popular Engadget site, amongst others. Since he’d learned a lot of lessons about what made a successful blog, RCRD LBL became an idea about creating a site – a niche media site – where you try to connect with a very specific audience, and you try to do that by being very authentic or real with that audience. In thinking about what was wrong with the music industry, it seemed there was all this excitement and interest in music now, but it wasn’t being monetized through the selling of CDs or even digital downloads. He felt that the real excitement, energy and passion was all taking place online in various forms, whether it was music blogs or social networks.

So Peter thought, “What if you could take a lot of these lessons I’ve learned from what makes a great blog, and apply that to the music industry?” He recognized that there is a lot of interesting overlap between what a label is really good at, which is identifying and cultivating talent, and what a music blog is really great at, which is identifying and sharing music from artists that the blogger is really excited about. In the places where they overlap, you could create a really interesting business. You could create a site that gives away the music, just like a music blog does, but do it legally like a label does, and then monetize everything through advertising like a blog does. All the components fit together nicely, and it seemed like an instance where you can align the interests of everyone involved. The artists that are participating are getting compensated and also get to build their audience. The fans get great music for free, and the brands that are partnering with us and supporting what we’re doing get a chance to be seen as actively being part of the solution to some of the problems that the music industry is having. Everyone wins!

Up Close: RCRD LBL Co-Founder And CEO Peter Rojas — FMQB

—————-
Now playing: Moby - Last Night (Album Mash-Up Mix)
via FoxyTunes

RCRD LBL

Published
by
Rob Stefaniak
on November 15, 2007
in Management
. 0 Comments

RCRD LBLA next-generation record label, called RCRD LBL launched today. It is a network of ad supported online record labels and blogs offering completely free music and multimedia content from emerging and established artists.

A joint venture of Downtown Records, the independent label behind Gnarls Barkley and others, and Peter Rojas, a journalist and entrepreneur who founded the respected technology blogs Gizmodo and Engadget, RCRD LBL is a hybrid record label and blog; its releases are to be posted on the company’s web site for downloading, free and unrestricted by digital-rights management software that limits copying.

As sited in the WSJ article, in a negative report on Warner Music Group Corp. earlier this month, Pali Research analyst Richard Greenfield wrote: “A new model for music consumption must emerge, and that model most likely involves DRM-free downloadable music at no cost to consumers, fully supported by advertising.” This, Mr. Greenfield said, is a direct result of the fact that “an increasing majority of world-wide consumers simply view recorded music as free.” That report helped push down the stock of Warner Music almost 10% in a day.

Visitors to the site are welcome to download and enjoy any music posted on the site, provided it is being used for personal, non-commercial use. You can do things like make copies of the tracks and put them on all of your music-playing devices, burn them on to mix CDs for your friends, even use them in videos you make, as long as you’re only doing these things for strictly noncommercial purposes. In short: RCRD LBL is happy for you to share their music, but you’re not allowed to make money off of it. If you’d like to to use one of their tracks in any way that would be considered a commercial use, you must contact them first.

Music Test: Can a Firm Profit From Free Tunes? - WSJ.com

RCRD LBL Solves the Free Music Riddle | Listening Post from Wired.com