Digital Motion dot net

Convenience Wins, Hubris Loses and Content vs. Context, a Presentation for Some Music Industry Friends at FISTFULAYEN

I’m sorry I didn’t post a link to this sooner. This is a nice perspective on the whole digital music landscape from the boss over at Yahoo Music. We’ve heard from the major labels and we’ve heard from the retailers, but Y! has a different view which is interesting. I’ve followed this since the beginning. I started Unit Circle Rekkids right near the start of the Internet’s explosive growth period. I saw different digital solutions emerge and fall by the wayside. After getting burned on Liquid Audio (if you can imagine, back then you paid them (A LOT) for the software to encode your music so that they could sell it and take a cut).

Over the years, digital distribution has changed from an interesting idea to I think the best solution for indie music. If we can get the majors to get over themselves, I think the days of manufacturing CDs are at an end.

Beatportal has a cool preview of Live 7 up that is a bit more interesting (to my eyes) than the Ableton marketing docs…

Ableton Live 7 – sneak preview

Once in a while I would notice cdconnection popping up as a customer in my sales at cdbaby. After seeing it again this morning, I decided to check out who the heck they were. It turns out that all of the albums from my label are listed there, for sale, at nearly double the price that they are available elsewhere.

So, what cdconnection is doing is listing my albums in their inventory and when a customer buys from them, they buy from cdbaby and then mail it to their customer. This is incredible. Not that cdconnection is doing this. I mean, kudos to them for thinking this scheme up. What amazes is me is that people are buying these overpriced albums from them when they are available much cheaper even at Amazon.com, cd baby or direct from unit circle.

I just did a search on a random unit circle album and I see that cdconnection is paying for #1 placement on google for my artists and albums. The first “real” search result is Amazon. I mean how dumb do you gotta be to not notice that?

This is sort of the genius/evilness of web 2.0. With the magic of technology you can suck in the entire All Music Guide and use it to populate a database for your on-line store. Then you can go find the cheapest prices for your “inventory,” mark it up %200 and fulfill on sales only. The customer is happy, they got the record they wanted (little do they know that they are way overpaying for it), the on-line distributor is happy (a sale is a sale and they’ve already got their mark-up), even the label is happy (a sale is a sale, as long as they don’t do the math and realize that cdconnection is making more money off this sale than ANYONE else including the label/artist/whatever), cdconnection is happy (they don’t have to warehouse anything, they just resend whatever they receive, so it is a nearly pure-profit operation).

Yow.