Spotify money report

This will be in English, to follow up an earlier post. Since I notice the search terms on “Spotify revenue” from visitors to my blog, I suppose the subject is interesting for you. Yesterday I got the first report from our distributor Phonofile, which has added Spotify to their flora of webshops.

As we are a small record company and not too famous bands, the numbers might seem small, but compared to other services like Last FM, we have a much better channel at Spotify, with more listeners. It seems like a great streaming service and I hope they will develop even more. It is also a wonderful alternative to illegal file sharing, since it really disarms all their arguments: Easy, free and with a great range of products.

Our band The Modesty gets the largest audience and we hope for even more, since they will tour England in the autumn. 8000 listeners from april – june is quite nice I think, and the detailed statistics tells about nationalities, popular songs and the type of Spotify account. The money then? Well, Gramtone gets a total of 6,87 Norwegian Kronor for this listening. Mainly the amount comes from the large numbers of free advert-based account. Tree full of people got 250 listeners and earned Gramtone 0,30 Norwegian Kronor and P.A.N got 300 listener and 0,27 Norwegian kronor.

The monetary infrastructure goes like this: Spotify shares the income 50/50, then our distributor gets 20% and after Gramtone gets the amounts I just mentioned, we share it 90/10 in the artists favour.

 So there you have it. Nothing to make a living from, but maybe a complement to other channels for our bands.

Spotify a loss for musicians?

Recently a new service has emerged from a swedish company Spotify. They offer a gigantic music library available for streaming, a brilliant idea at first and we at Gramtone got on the bus. Through our distributor Phonofile in Norway, we are avaliable on Spotify since last week. Our three releases The Modesty, Tree full of people and PAN are all available. Our coming releases Ralph and Kallocain wants to be published too.

But when talking about the economy, the terms are not particilarly ok for the musicians. First, the income generally is modest, where enormous amounts of artists will share a fairy small cake of money from ads and some paying for subscriptions. Then Spotify shares it 50/50. After that the distributor get 20% and the rest goes into the record company. Since Gramtone has a philosophy of high percentage to our bands, 80-90% of our income, they will get what they can. But as our distributor explained a bit ironically:
“…which will come down to about 0,000000001 euro per play”.
So if an atist is played about one billion times, the will get one euro from Spotify. A revolution? No, but hopefully a complement.

An other thought: Will streaming services really benefit music in the long term? The huge amounts of small labels and independent bands will be forced to work with the few, huge companies that can afford this kind of technology. Now when web publishing is cheap, one can set up their own webshop and work directly with the audience without middlemen, this kind of service maybe puts a gigantic middleman to separate this direct contact. But I might be wrong. It would be cool to hear about Spotifys strategies. I will call them. I also have a few more subjects to talk with them about.

This article (in swedish though) tells about recent development. As usual, the comments are very interesting:
http://www.dn.se/kultur-noje/musik/den-strommande-musikrevolutionen-1.822297

Edit 8/8 2009: Read the post after our first report from our distributor “Spotify money report”:
http://gramtone.wordpress.com/2009/08/08/176/

The first reviews

Today the two first reviews were published for the CD:s we sent 1,5 weeks ago. They were really great. Tree full of people gets a 3 and a 4 out of 5, and The Modesty gets two 4:s. It is a good start and a way to market the bands for gigs in the regions/cities where the magaziens are read. After new years eve, we will start marketing the bands for lots of live gigs. Here are the reviews, but only in swedish, unfortunately:

Tree full of people, NT:
http://www.nt.se/noje/artikel.aspx?articleid=2936062 
The Modesty,  NT:
http://www.nt.se/noje/artikel.aspx?articleid=2935958
Both bands in Corren:
http://www.corren.se/archive/2007/12/19/jic23mitwvu7hau.xml

Up and running

The CD:s for Tree full of people arrived last thursday on a big stack, weighing 114 kg. Everything looks and sounds perfect. I felt like a child, nervous of what the package would contain, if there was to be some error on the CD:s or if I had forgotten to order a CD inlay… Of course I have found some really small flaws, but I suppose that the audience will not see them. Or we can have a competition and see who finds themost errors.

We rigged for the releaseparty and TFOP played the same evening. The Social Services and Dreamboy played at the same event. There will be some footage on Youtube soon.

Now we are doing a big effort to send CD:s to magazines and newspapers, and to the record stores. This will take place in the weekend, since The Modestys CD:s will arrive on friday. We have gotten deals with six of the nine stores I want. Now for christmas, some of them dont really have time to deal with this, so I will wait until january to get the last deals. You can see on the web page where to get the music.

29/11 – The big day!

Today the first CD – Tree full of People’s Release of all colors – will arrive from the factory i the Czech Republic, and we will throw the release party tonight. Our marketing has turned out fairly good, and there has been a lot of buzz in different contact forums. I think we are on the way now.

Music in webshops

Yesterday was a stressful one: I was supposed to do lots of other things, but the day started with a happy occation: Tree full of people are now in the first web shops. I found it on the top of the front page in a norwegian store, which are in the distributor phonophile’s network. So people can now start to buy it. Which rendered an intensive work for me: I sent pressreleases, updated the web site and made a newsletter post to all our buddies, telling about the start of the music publishing and release party.

I also put the album on Last FM, and a radio play with Tree full of people as the station will mix lots of beautiful bands I love. Now we are just waiting for the CD:s to arrive, all the other web shops to put it up. itunes are slowest – it takes up to five weeks.

Also we are rehersing for the release party. And it sounds better than I dared to think.

Making of the first album

Just a glimpse into the process of creating the Tree full of people album. There were some songs finished years ago, and I made a demo udnr the name of Jodu, which went straight into a drawer. I just didn’t know what to do with it. But the few people who had heard it told me to do something with it. So in the winter of 2006-07, I started recording, and used six old songs as the base, writing seven new ones. I brought lots of friends to our lovely studio, to do the instruments that I cant handle. It became a very slow process.

 At first I really fantizised about being finished by novembr 2006, but it took almost a year longer, with all the people, new songs bubbling up in my mind, and of course the strange process of being more and more thorough as the time passed. I suppose the album was more or less finished about may 2007.

I got a EAN bar code fast and cheap, via a music organization, and started to feel some professionalism around the project.  Then I started wondering about mastering, and read a lot about it. I talked to companies, comparing and testing. After a while I realized that I could do the whole mastering myself. It feels a bit risky, because there is a certain air of magic around mastering. And some audiophile will certainly not like it, but I figure that the result is good, and that I can pay for the next album to be mastered if this sells somewhat ok.  

During the summer it was time to look at the cover. I had an idea inspired by art nouveu poster art, which I finished. It is not bad at all, but a bit to hippie/drug related for the music on the album. I like the design, but it was not correct. So I had a look at the jazz label Blue Note cover art and was quite inspired by that instead. So with a more graphic looks and lots of photos of the people on the record, I finished the cover in september.

The pressing is made in Czech republic, at a factory called GZCD. They are cheap, efficient and very friendly. There are lots of alternatives to choose from, regarding sleeves, boklets, special designs and such. I just wanted the whole album to look professional. So 16 full color pages in the booklet, full color CD-print and a normal jewl case.  The costs are very well controlled. I record for free in our studio, which allows it to take time. The EAN bar code costed 20 euros, the pressing of 1000CD:s, printing and freight from Czech republic is 1150 euros. I suppose stamps for sending stuff around to media and reviewers will be around 100 euros. Another 100 euros for distribution to stores. I will put some money into marketing, and depending on how we can cooperate with that in our cooperative, it will not be too expensive either.