Online Music Distribution - "Classical" is still problematic

When I recently released my album "My Music in 2010", I used CD Baby as the distributor. They take care of submitting the music files do the various online sites such as iTunes, Amazon, Zune, Spotify etc. Is in principle a good idea, but there are still problems with Classical Music.

When I entered all the information about the tracks, I naturally indicated the composer of each piece. The instructions stated that the track name should not contain any artist name, so I did not put the composers' names into that field. Since each track had a separate field for the composer, I thought that the composer would appear in an additional information field. However, it turns out that the composer's name is nowhere present: neither on the track list of the album at CD Baby nor at any of the online music sites that I checked (Amazon, iTunes, Zune). This is quite annoying: now these tracks are without the composer information... And once published, this info cannot be added anymore.

This means that from now on I will have to place the composer's name into the track title. This is what is also done with most other classical music tracks that are online.

Another annoying thing: on Microsoft's Zune my music appears under the category "Pop", although I had explicitly given the "Classical" label.

It seems that the digital online music distribution is still not suitable for classical music...

Amazon is fast - "My Music 2010" online there

In February 2011 I had uploaded my album "My Music 2010" to CD Baby, and it was immediately available there. After that, CD Baby was supposed to distribute it to all major online music distributors (OMDs) such as Amazon, iTunes, Zune, Spotify and others. But I had forgotten co click one last button there... and so the distribution did not happen. I noticed this only last week - and then rectified this immediately.

Since then I have once in a while checking, and today I saw that this album is now available on Amazon. Quite fast!

It is not yet available on iTunes.

The pricing is beyond my control - it is determined by the individual OMDs; I only was able to set the price at CD Baby.

This album in this constellation of tracks is NOT available as such compilation on my web site - only the individual files can be obtained from my site and have to be collected manually to be assembled into this collection. So there is some benefit for the buyers of this album!

My Music now Commercially Available

On 10.February my new artist page on CD Baby went online. I had signed on with them, and have created my first album: My Music in 2010. This album contains 8 tracks with the most recent renditions of music which I had created in 2010.

These music tracks are now for sale, on CD Baby, but soon also on all their online music distributors which they have partnership agreements with. This includes iTunes, Amazon, Zune, Spotify and many others.

Does this mean I will no longer make my music available for free on my website? No, it does not. All the tracks which are available for purchase, are also available on my website. The agreement with CD Baby is not exclusive, I still can do with my music recordings whatever I want. And I have decided to offer them here still for free. Does this make sense? Not from a purely business point of view: In order to ensure that everybody pays for my music, I should remove it from my web page and have it only available through online pay sites. But I want to pursue another business model: I want that as many people as possible have the opportunity to listen to my music, for free, before they would pay; and if they like the music, they can then move to a site where they can then express their appreciation through a purchase of one or more tracks.

This may be a slightly optimistic assumption, that anyone would want to pay for something that they can get for free. But I do have a believe in the good of mankind, and I am sure that there will be a few people who will be clicking the purchase button on some of those online sites. If using iTunes or Zune, then this will also make it easier and straightforward to manage the music on the mobile device, so there is actually some additional value in the purchase rather than only getting the free MP3 files.

So for the time being, there will be the free versions on my site, and there will be the commercial versions of the same renditions online for purchase at various Online Music Distributors. I plan, however, to release a few special recordings only for purchase. One such album is already in the making.

What am I going to do with the little revenue that I might get from the music sales? I plan to use it for keeping my music equipment up to date. Software needs updates, I also need to purchase some more tools, and there are cost related to web hosting. All my music activities are currently running at a loss, and it would be great if I could stop this and at least break even.

The album that I am releasing now is My Music in 2010. I plan to do this now at the end of every year, to document my musical work for each year. I have no physical CD, these albums are all only available online.

Online Music Distribution Experience

Here I want to share some of my first experiences with online music distribution services. So far I have uploaded through TuneCore and WaTunes. For checking if my music is online available, I did a search for "reinhold behringer" on each of the sites.

As a summary, from TuneCore the music seems to be fastest uploaded to Amazon. iTunes and AmieStreet seem to be the slowest - they did not yet have any music available after 6 days.

Here is my experience with TuneCore:

Date	Service	Issues and Comments
Day 1	Uploading Music to TuneCore	Files had to be in wave or MP3 > 300 bps - I uploaded wave.
8 hours	First of the uploaded music is on Amazon.	Because TuneCore does have no classical category, I put my music in "Electronic" and "Inspirational". That translated on Amazon to "Dance/Electronic" and "Christian/Gospel".
Day 3	Music is on Lala.	Listen only possible in US. Provides number of listens. Fortunately category stays as "Electronic" instead of something weird.
Day 5	Music is on ShockHound.	Uses "Piggy Bank" for payment. Puts my music into genre: Spiritual
Day 6	Music is on Rhapsody.	Cateogory: Electronica/Dance. Artwork is only partially there (is missing for Tristan, is not showing in enlarged icon view). Listen is only available in US.
Day 6	Music is on Napster (UK, cannot access US).	But need to be a member of Napster to see the tracks.
	Emusic:	No way of checking, because even the search requires a registration.

And here is my experience with WaTunes:

Date	Service	Issues and Comments
Day 1	Creating Album on WaTunes.	In its current form the GUI and upload interface are not very intuitive to use. One has only one attempt in setting up the album, later changes are through (the very responsive) tech support.
Day 2	Uploaded music content to WaTunes.	Track files are packed into one zip file which is then uploaded via web interface. I wondered how the track order in the album would be determined. WaTunes responded that one adds a number as the first characters in the track file name. Also when creating the album one should add the track titles in the form - I had forgotten to do that.
Day 3	Music is "In Review".

In summary:

TuneCore has a professional service, at a price of $9.99 per single. The uploaded music was fast online on Amazon. But the limited genre classifications that are offered by TuneCore, are a real bummmer. After uploading 5 singles, I have halted all further uploads indefinitely, until they fix their genre classification and add at least a "classical" category.

WaTunes offers free upload to iTunes, eMusic, and ShockHound. Their service is good value, but it appears not yet mature and really functioning. But they do have a large variety of genres. However, my music uploaded through them is not yet online anywhere, I got told it would be online by mid August. There are several issues with the web interface, which currently only allows a very limited management by the artist. One has to wait until the "New Experience" is implemented on their site, and until the VIP service is activated (expected by mid July, with large number of additional stores).

A note regarding iTunes: they really appear not to be artist-friendly at all. They are not interested in independent artist signing on, but recommend that they go through one of those intermediaries like TuneCore or WaTunes. And even through those, they take a long time until the music appears there in their store.

Amazon appears to be the winner - with the most rapid online publication of the music and with a well established and accessible brand. I have not yet found out if artists can sign on directly to Amazon...