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Sex sells, doesn't it?
Tales of financial chaos at the heart of an online porn empire.
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Review
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[11/24/99]

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By Jamais Cascio
[11/23/99]

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Just sign a contract giving an online music distributor like MP3.com free, unlimited distribution rights to your original music, and bingo! Not only are you on the road to stardom ("Sell CDs!" trumpets MP3.com's online artist sign-up sheet. "Get famous!") but you get to thumb your nose at the traditional recording industry along the way.

For Dana Woodaman and thousands of independent musicians like him, however, the reality doesn't even come close to the hype.

"I've sold a total of one CD online, and I think that's pretty typical," says Woodaman, who first began uploading tracks from his self-produced Brain Transfer Project to four online music distribution sites nearly a year ago.

If industry figures are any indication, Woodaman's guess is on the money. In August, MP3.com sold 15,600 CDs on behalf of 26,700 artists listed in its online database, according to the digital music news service Webnoize. That's about half a CD per artist. And MP3.com is not alone.

"Half a CD per month is pretty standard among the top three [online music distributors] in the indie space (IUMA/Internet Underground Music Archive, MP3.com, and Riffage.com)," admits Antony Bryden, general manager of IUMA, which was acquired by the digital download site EMusic.com earlier this year. "Per band, that works out to about $3 a month."

Online music distributors have been enormously successful at painting a picture of themselves as a virtual David out to slay the mighty recording industry Goliath. By promoting themselves as cool anti-establishment sites fighting the good fight on behalf of downtrodden musicians everywhere, online music distributors have persuaded thousands of musicians to hand over their tunes, no questions asked. As a one-time Web developer and the wife of a jazz guitarist, I've been amazed at the difference between how Net-savvy entrepreneurs and musicians have reacted to the online music industry.

By all accounts, indie artists are signing over their material in record numbers -- putting up their songs free of charge on sites like MP3.com or Riffage.com in hopes of selling CDs, or signing over their work to online record labels like EMusic, which sells downloadable music for over 150 established labels plus independents. Of course, many of these artists are "weekend warriors," whose music might have been heard by few people other than their hometown buddies before getting some exposure through an online distributor. And the fact that they're not making money through online distributors might have as much to do with the quality of their product as with distribution.

Be that as it may, if MP3.com isn't making money yet there are those who think it will someday. The company went public in July with a valuation exceeding $1 billion.

The reason? In a word, marketing. The distributors have done a great job of convincing the musicians that MP3 can reinvent the power structure.

After all, it's a digital revolution! If you listen to the online music distributors, the big record companies are running scared: The Internet puts the reins of power back into the hands of the artists! What online music distributors really mean, of course, is that the Internet puts the reins into their hands.

Next page | Money for nothing, and the music's free