February 27, 2010

Host Your Own Music For $10 A Year

Inexpensive Web Hosting & Free Online Storage
imageWhat’s an album cost these days? On Amazon or iTunes around $10. Interestingly, this is the annual cost for the Chromedocs domain and there are other providers offering web hosting for this same low price. Just type “web hosting $10 year” into your favorite search engine.

My Portland, Oregon friends Wester Daywick have generously provided a copy of their debut album to host online. My favorite tracks are Less Is More and Winnie but each song is superb indie rock in the same vein as Fugazi or Queens Of The Stone Age. For those who like variety, there are 7 audio formats to choose from and tracks can be downloaded individually or as an entire folder including artwork.

AAC FLAC M4A MP3 OGG WMA WMA Lossless

…and just like that, an album is online for $10 a year. I’m taking advantage of Blogger and Google working together cohesively as well as 25gb of storage space from Microsoft’s Skydrive service. Bobby, Louis, and Trent can always use some beer gas money. Show them some love by catching a show or buying some merchandise. For more information on all things Wester Daywick…

http://www.westerdaywick.com
http://www.facebook.com/westerdaywick.pdx
http://www.twitter.com/WesterDaywick
http://www.myspace.com/WesterDaywick
http://www.reverbnation.com/westerdaywick
http://www.youtube.com/westerdaywickpdx
http://westerdaywick.bandcamp.com/

Content Management Systems, Creative Commons, and Direct Delivery 
Throwing an album online is a snap but a band should get some financial reward for all their hard work. This doesn’t stray far from maintaining a blog. For bands with their own domains, a few hours of creativity and an open source content management system (CMS) like Drupal, Joomla, and Modx can result in aesthetically pleasing presentation of your music as well as online payment processing. Check out the Create a Killer Band Site with Drupal: A 6-part Tutorial Series on GoMediaZine to help get you started. If the examples in the previous links don’t have you impressed, have a look a the Pearl Jam website running on Drupal…image Don’t rush to duplicate Pearl Jam until you’ve browsed through the Jets Overhead website. Jets Overhead hails from nearby Victoria, British Columbia. They released their 2006 album Bridges using the voluntary purchase model. With their latest album No Nations, the band is now supporting the creative commons movement.image Jets Overhead albums are available through all the major retailers. However, check out the choices when buying directly through their website…imageimageimageimageimageimageThis band really gets the modern industry. Fans are treated to free, high-quality digital downloads of rarities, remixes, and instrumentals in a variety of formats not just the merchandise being sold.

Any band is capable of duplicating this model or extending it with their own creativity. For musicians who typically lose money after recording, instead of printing 800 discs, reduce it to 50 and host your songs online in a variety of formats. Get on iTunes, eMusic, Amie Street, etc but don’t forget the value in direct marketing. Even if you take a bold leap and offer music for name your own prices, $1 a couple thousand times is a reasonably achievable goal. The idea here is not to sacrifice one method for the other but to adopt both. For $10 a year, the return on your investment has far more potential than any other strategy you could choose from so why not include it in your arsenal. Keep selling CDs and digital downloads through music retailers but pump the direct marketing through your own website where the money goes straight to your own checking account.

Posted by ChromeToaster at 2/27/2010 04:39:00 AM
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February 21, 2010

Packaged Media Remains Less Expensive Than Digital Downloads

Buy Online/Save Money
I recently purchased a copy of This Perfect World by Freedy Johnston and discovered a significant advantage to buying retail over digital.
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The first advantage is obvious. With used copies for as little as 1¢ and new for $3.95, packaged media is far less expensive. Other advantages are not so obvious. A good example is buying a CD allows me to rip to the audio format of my choosing rather than the preference of the retailer. While an iTunes purchase would have my album in AAC or eMusic in VBR MP3, I’m free to encode with the format that best suits my audio needs. In this case, I’ve chosen the lossless WMA codec. Retailers like Zunior.com have a lossless option but at additional cost.
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On February 12th, I purchased a new copy of This Perfect World for $2.99 which included shipping and received it on February 15th. The biggest drawback is the delay in shipping but I didn’t need instant gratification and saved $5 from Amazon’s MP3 album cost of $8.96. Amazon still made a little from this purchase. One of the primary reasons I do most of my shopping on Amazon is because of the wide array of choices at better-than-Walmart prices. I believe they may be the only retailer who offers digital downloads, retail, and redistributed media.
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What follows is the cost of downloading the same album from some of the other popular retailers:

iTunes Rhapsody Napster
$9.99 $9.99 $9.95

Make Your Own Music: The Freedom To Choose Your Own Format
I’m very picky about my audio files and want this section to be a quick run-through on audio compression without being overly technical. Put simply, audio compression takes an original audio file and puts it into a smaller container, the most popular of which is MP3. There are many compression methods but they come in two flavors: lossy and lossless. Lossy loses some audio quality while lossless claims not to. MP3 files are the most compatible across portable media players. Most portable media players will also play WMA and some will play lossless FLAC files. While there are many audio formats like ogg, Monkey’s Audio, AAC, and M4A, I’m sticking with MP3, FLAC, and WMA because these formats work best on the player I use, a Creative Zen X-Fi2.

There are just as many methods for doing this as there are formats. I use MediaMonkey not only for ripping audio but also for managing the audio collection on my PC and portable media player. I won’t go into the specifics about doing this but here’s a screenshot showing all the choices I have using MediaMonkey:
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The end result is the album I wanted in the digital format I chose for $2.99 instead of AAC for $9.99 or MP3 from Amazon for $8.96.

Not Just Music For Less
Freedom like this can terrify retailers. Instead of responding with lower prices, illegal downloading has turned into a scapegoat for proprietary formats and encryption methods. Every step towards better encryption results in even better decryption. While not acknowledged formally, retailers of DVD burning suites are aware of consumers’ wants and provide methods for exporting audio and video to compressed formats.
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Like the audio CD example above, consumers can save big by purchasing new or used DVDs online and converting them to the video format of their choosing. This not only results in a digital copy but one that can be transferred between all your media players. In my case, I have the freedom to playback my media between a Zen, G1, PS3, laptop, and two PCs. Most digital downloads are locked to the device the media was downloaded to.

To purchase a used copy of The Devil’s Backbone on DVD from Amazon in very good condition is $5.97 ($2.99 + $2.98 S&H). A digital download from Amazon’s video on demand service is $9.99.
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At the moment, because retail media still remains a viable option, it is the less expensive choice. It’s also the better choice for the savvy shopper looking for options in the format of their digital media. This will remain the case unless retailers give in to lower prices, develop unbreakable encryption methods, or lobbyists succeed in the pursuit of intellectual property lockdown. In the meantime, enjoy the cost benefits of online shopping and avoid the digital market altogether.

Posted by ChromeToaster at 2/21/2010 02:43:00 PM
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