Distributing Music Online

An enormous crop of mushrooms springing up overnight has been a common story since the debut of the Web, but even by Internet standards, the massive and rapid growth of online music-distribution outlets is pretty amazing. From a half-dozen two years ago, the number of places to buy music online has climbed into the thousands. Many people glibly predict the end of the big oligopolist record companies, and few in the music business would mourn their demise. After years of ignoring the Web (and sometimes actively attempting to cripple it), the "majors" are now getting into the act. But the time they lost is irreplaceable, and it's now clear that independent music distributors are going to be a far bigger piece of the picture than ever before.

Will the majors disappear like the dinosaurs to which they've so often been compared in the last couple of years? Not likely. With tens of thousands of new albums released every year, the massive marketing resources that only a large organization can command are still a must if one expects to sell music to a broader fan base than the band members' parents (this mirrors the experience of most other e-commerce ventures). And what we pundits refer to as the "installed base" of CDs, to say nothing of peoples' habits, is so pervasive that it will be a long, long time before the traditional channels of music distribution fade away. But only a very determined ostrich could deny that there's a revolution underway, or that the days when a handful of major record labels dominated the music scene are over.

This phenomenon is not solely due to the Web. All forms of media are rapidly becoming cheaper to produce, and therefore more fragmented into mini-markets. In the days when there were only 3 TV channels (and one of them didn't come in very well), and a handful of radio stations in every metropolitan area, mass-produced "top 40" was the scene, and "specialty" artists who played blues or jazz (for example) tended to starve, while something like bluegrass or Klezmer music was almost totally unviable from a commercial standpoint. The evolution of dozens of cable TV channels, digital radio and far more efficient transportation has led to a huge explosion in the amount and diversity of music that is commercially available. Happy days for both musicians and fans, even before the Internet entered the equation.

All this is of course beyond the scope of this article, which will focus on the current state of music distribution over the Web, with an emphasis on what a small record company, music retailer or artist can do to market music online.

Contents:

Some Fine Day...
Broadcasting Music Online
Sample This!
Closing the Sale
Closing the Sale - Part 2
Online Distribution Today

Digital Distribution of Music
Some Fine Day...