The new blog has only been up for a couple of months and already we’ve complained about the music industry more times than I can count on one hand. While it may be a great deal of fun to repeatedly kick the poor guys while they’re down, it’s not especially productive considering that the disdain new artists have for the industry (not to mention the completely backwards and bull-headed ways in which the labels treat them in return), have left a lot of people unsure about their options when it comes to recording and distributing music.

Crumbling industry aside, people are still making music, and there are a lot of folks trying to pick up the slack on the business side of things to help make the transition into the professional music world slightly less wretched. Here’s a bit of a primer on a few music services that are attractive to both artists and fans alike.

1.) AmieStreet.com - When a new social music service launches that isn’t completely crippled or broken, we expect folks like Techcrunch or Ars to pick it up, but when everybody from NPR to Business Week and The Wall Street Journal have good things to say, it’s safe to assume that somebody’s on to something. Especially when that somebody starts the business out of their house in Long Island and ends up getting financial backing from Amazon.

At its core AmieStreet is little more than just another music store, so what does it have going for it? Everything is DRM-free for starters. The site is community driven, with the user base recommending albums and songs to each other, bringing certain albums into prominence on the site’s main pages. This is important at AmieStreet for two reasons. The first reason is that anybody and their brother can upload music to the site, so a social voting system works to bury all the music that’s probably not worth your time of day. The key word here is bury. Music doesn’t get deleted if it fails to pass some editorial vetting process, which is important for new musicians who are trying to build a fan base. Your music will stay on the site for as long as you’d like it to.

The other reason AmieStreet is pushing the aspect of a user community has to do with the site’s dynamic pricing system. This is what really sets AmieStreet aside from most everybody else, and is the single largest factor driving all the positive press about them these days. Here’s how it works. Once you upload a song or album it becomes available for download in AmieStreet’s music store. The initial price? Free. As people begin to download music individual songs will slowly creep up in price until it rivals the 99 cents per song commonly charged on mainstream music sites. 70% of all revenue from music sales is paid to the artists.

The downside? As is always the case with specialized music stores, no matter how clever the mechanics may be behind how the music is promoted and sold, there is very little to speak of in terms of how much music is actually available. Folks can easily jump onto a torrent site, mp3sparks, or even the dreaded i-tunes music store and find exactly what they are looking for. Not the case here. There is an extremely limited selection when compared to the competition. AmieStreet will be quick to jump in and cite the dozens of labels that are using them for distribution, and it’s true that you can find plenty of well known music here for far less than it is being sold elsewhere, but it’s clearly hit and miss.

2.) MagnaTune.com - The tagline under the Magnatune logo is straightforward enough: “We are not evil.” Unlike Amiestreet, Magnatune is a record label. You can’t upload music to their site without first securing a contract with them. There’s no social network or competition between albums. Hell, they don’t even have a tag cloud. So what’s all the excitement about? Magnatune is one of the countless small labels operating today who work under a philosophy that actually supports people who make music, and although it hurts us to say that this is a rare experience, they don’t get in the way of people trying to listen to music either.

There’s no DRM, which is a given if we’re talking about them in a positive light. You’ve got download options other than mp3; Flac and Ogg are a few welcome examples. You can listen to an album in it’s entirety before purchasing it and, once you have purchased it, you are encouraged to make copies for your friends. Speaking of sales, 50% of the sale price goes directly to the artist, and that’s a sale price that is set by you, the consumer. The whole thing works on a sliding scale from $5 to $18.

One of the selling points artists look at before signing with Magnatune is their uncanny ability to license music. Their music is all released under a creative commons license and is free to use for non-commercial broadcast. They apparently do a great deal of business on the commercial licensing side of things as well. They’ve issued over 2000 such licenses in their 5 years of operation. I’m not saying I respect Moby for sneaking his music into every television commercial that has aired on planet Earth in the last decade or so, but for new musicians that want nothing more than to have their music heard by a larger audience, it certainly doesn’t hurt.

All in all Magnatune is doing what it does extremely well. They’ve been using a consumer-set pricing model for far longer than Trent Reznor and company have made it the trendy thing to do. They’re operating under a set of principals that can only help to ensure their longevity with all of the uncertainty surrounding today’s more traditional distribution methods. But while they might win awards for proof of concept, they too fall prey to many of the lesser traits associated with being a small label. The selection of music simply isn’t there. While the quality of the music is definitely better than the free-for-all model described on AmieStreet above (Magnatune accepts approximately 3% of all submissions), there is something inherently broken in the experience when your fan base is forced to shop at three different sites to buy music from three different bands. Repeatedly arguing about the selection of music borders on being unfair when we remind ourselves that we’re not talking about a company claiming to be anything more than a record label, but when these folks tack on a retail division packed full of innovative features and revolutionary business models, the disappointment in selection stands out like a sore thumb, if only because we would love to see some of these new services be more all encompassing.

3.) CreateSpace.com - Print-on-Demand is like vanity publishing for the twenty-first century. They’ve managed to keep all the perks in place, lower the cost, and do away with most of the PR banter (read: lies) about how they’ll back you on the marketing side of things to get your project rolling. The profit margins are, of course, still virtually non-existent, but given the ability to self-market an album online these days, the sky manages to maintain it’s role as the proverbial limit.

So basically, it works like this: You record an album and mail it to CreateSpace, upload album artwork, track information, etc. They mail you a proof of the finished product for approval. Once you’re happy with the way everything looks/sounds, you finalize the album, set pricing, and activate it within their system. You can then buy physical copies in bulk (at their markups, or course), or sell them through the CreateSpace website, where they handle all the order processing, printing, and shipping for you. You pay a flat printing fee per sale, give them a 15% commission, and the rest of the sale price is paid to you as a royalty.

The real selling point here, and the only reason a print-on-demand service made it’s way onto this list, is that CreateSpace is owned by Amazon, so in concert with your store on the CreateSpace website, you can sell your physical album or downloadable MP3’s on Amazon.com as well. The commission, of course, jumps to something like 45%, so your cut per album sold drops to a couple of dollars per disc, but having your music for sale on Amazon as opposed to some unknown music site seems like kind of a fair trade.

Our take on using CreateSpace is as follows: since you’re not signing away any rights by working with them, you’re free to get physical copies of your discs printed elsewhere, and you’re guaranteed to save money if you do. The real asset comes from using Amazon as an online retail space. If you’re a small band you don’t want to deal with credit card vendors, inventory, overhead, and the rest of the headache that comes from selling your wares online. Leaving this work to CreateSpace can be a godsend in that you can maintain an online retail presence on what is now the number 2 online music retail site in operation today without spending a dime.

4.) Bit Torrent - Now that we’ve got all that “innovative retail” stuff off our chests, fuck selling music. At least as an exclusive means of distribution, at any rate. There are hundreds of private and public Bit Torrent trackers that would love for you to upload your album on their sites. Giving your music away for free may sound like economic suicide, but it’s also a great way to get your work into the hands of thousands of people who probably would have never heard your music anyways, much less buy an album. Let’s face it, they found you on a website catering to a user base whose single unifying characteristic is not paying for music.

Tags:amazon, amiestreet, bit torrent, createspace, file sharing, magnatune, music, music distribution, music retail, print on demand, record label, riaa, self marketing, social networking

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