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!

Tristan, Siegfried, and Isolde: Rank 6 (of 9) on Amazon

Trying out the search "tristan siegfried isolde", between 9 and 11 items come up on Amazon. When sorting them by "Bestselling", my "Tristan and Siegfried meet Isolde" appears on rank 6 - one above the Vienna Philharmonic (who have a compilation of the Siegfried Idyll and the Tristan and Isolde overture). But they are also on rank 5, one above me: with their Tannhaeuser Ouverture from the same album.

Now that I look a bit closer, in that list, I realise that it is sorted by alphabet of the title... which means all MP3 files in this list have probably the same statistics (my guess: 0).

Moldau on Amazon: Rank 209 out of 251

Just checked on Amazon: my recording of Smetana's Moldau is on rank 209, when searching for the term "Moldau" and sorting by "Bestselling". Nice - means I might have made one sale! :)

When searching Amazon for "Vltava", my recording comes even up on rank 60, out of 75. This is even better then Celibidache's version (rank 70)! Good that I put both name versions in the title.

For information: "Vltava" top-selling is the London Philharmonic Orchestra, and "Moldau" top-selling is Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra.

All files now online on Amazon

All of the recently uploaded files are now available on Amazon, less then 24 hours after submitting them through TuneCore. This is great!

But as noted in an earlier post: all the categories are wrong... because Tunecore does not have a classical category.

It seems that the discussion forum on Tunecore is a bit sleepy... not much activity, there seems to be one post per day. And nobody has yet answered my posts, in which I pointed out this problem and a few other minor issues...

Possible Problem with Music Preview

As I went to Amazon and did a "preview", the Tristan sounded ok. However, the "Snow is Dancing" was at double the speed, double the pitch. Immediately I checked the original wave file that I had uploaded - that sounded ok. Tried the web preview on another PC, and there it was ok...

Not sure what this is all about. Since the Tristan preview sounds ok and only the Debussy preview had a problem, I thought that this would be an issue with the file on Amazon. But when I checked on another PC, going to the Amazon site (through both MS IE8 and Google Chrome), both file previews sounded right.

Must be something in that file, that makes my other PC replay it incorrectly. This could then happen to other listeners as well - and they may be put off by the robot who races through the notes of that wonderful piano piece and takes out any emotion, just playing it like a machine gun... (there might be a certain aestetics in that too, but that is not what I intended).

Search results on Amazon...

There appears to be a discrepancy between browsers when it comes to search results on Amazon. I accidentally found this out when searching what other music from my uploads has made it onto Amazon:
First I had worked in the Google Chrome browser. When searching on Amazon under "All Departments" for "reinhold behringer", then only my music shows up.
When, however, I do the same search on the Microsoft Internet Explorer 8, all my stuff comes up (the AR book which I edited more than 10 years ago, a few of my conference articles, and conference proceedings where I had been in the committee).

To compare, here are the actual URLs sent by each browser:
Chhome: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=reinhold+behringer&x=0&y=0
MS IE8: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=reinhold+behringer
The only difference is that Chrome appends seemingly meaningless coordinates. I added them to the URL in MS IE8 - the same result as before, each browser delivers different results.

This is quite astonishing! Does Amazon somehow discrinate against the Google Chrome browser? Or does Google Chrome send a hidden preference for showing only music results?

I have no idea why this is happening...

Tristan is already online on Amazon!

My music "Tristan and Siegfried meet Isolde" is already online on Amazon! This means it took only a few hours, less than 8 hours to be precise!

The other 3 pieces which I uploaded simultaneously with the Tristan are not there yet. I wonder if someone is actually listening to give the approval for publishing, of if just an automated test checks the integrity of the wave file.

I am tempted to just do a purchase of these files, to see how they are, and to start the run onto my music :)

My first music on AMAZON!

That was fast! I thought I would have to wait until July... but I was just curious and searched on Amazon for "reinhold behringer" - and the Debussy "The Snow is Dancing" came up already! (not sure why it came up twice...).

Of course it has only my plain blue "artwork" which is from the Tunecore template - but I did not have time to create a better one. I will, once I make a new version of it.

But I can also make the best of it - and create later an album called "The Blue Series", which only will have my very first recordings of music on it.

This Debussy is a first for me also in different ways: it is the first piano piece that I uploaded. In the past years I only had worked on those lush orchestral renditions and had never dared to create a plain piano recording...

Well, I believe that I would have to do more work on this one, to make it a bit more "rubato" and human in parts... but for now I am awaiting comments - and of course purchases!