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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
November 27, 2007
2007: The Year That TuneCore Broke the Music Biz Dam
In 2007, TuneCore built and launched a new music industry model - a model built on serving the artist as opposed to exploiting him. TuneCore provides universal access for all musicians to worldwide distribution in iTunes and more, marketing, promotion and automated accounting via a non-exclusive agreement that can be cancelled at any time. Its customers receive 100% of the revenue from the sale of their music, TuneCore take NO cut. With the change in the model, TuneCore unleashed a tidal wave of music and empowered tens of thousands of artists. The results have been stunning.
By the end of 2007, TuneCore will have hit some amazing milestones:
* TuneCore officially relaunches in May, 2007, allowing its customers to sell their music in the iTunes, Rhapsody, eMusic, Napster, Music.com, Zune, Yahoo, Amazonmp3, GroupieTunes stores and more.
* In 2007, TuneCore's customers will earn over $4.5 million dollars, through selling or streaming over nine million songs. This is the long tail - new money going to artists previously denied access.
* TuneCore delivers over 30,000 legitimate albums to the digital download stores significantly contributing to 90% music sales occurring outside of the RIAA
* TuneCore delivers releases from established stars (Public Enemy, The Dandy Warhols, Keith Richards, Lucas Grabeel (star of "High School Musical 2), Queens of the Stone Age and 2007 Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame Inductee Bill Medley as well as developing artists, like Eric Hutchinson, who reached #1 on the Heatseekers chart without a label [more info: http://www.billboard.com/bbcom/underground/index.jsp], selling over 100,000 songs in three weeks.
* TuneCore customers earn over $550,000 in September alone, creating revenue for its customers that would not have been generated without TuneCore.
* TuneCore launches "TuneCore Video," enabling anyone with a music video the opportunity to make it available to buy in iTunes around the world.
* TuneCore creates its own weekly iTunes chart with week-by-week, market-by-market sales info and top sellers among TuneCore customers. It is the only place to see this demographic information free of charge.
* TuneCore launches a partnership with Guitar Center, enabling it to directly market TuneCore customers' music to Guitar Center's customers as well as to offer cross-promotions, contests and discounts.
* TuneCore's cutting edge Ruby on Rails technology enables its customers to upload their music once and then, via an infinitely scalable automated system, convert it to the specifications of any third party to be made available on a variety of digital music stores the world over.
A significant change has taken place in the music industry in 2007. For the past 100 years, the distribution of music set the rules and structure around how to have a career as a musician. Record labels were the single entity firmly in control of every aspect of the industry - from determining which artist were going to have access and under what deal terms, to the recording process, packaging, marketing and promotion and distribution of the music as a "product."
Then the perfect storm hit: MP3 compression technology, the internet, proliferation of broadband, the original Napster educating the population of the world on what it meant to download a music file, eMusic launching the first on-line music store and then Apple launching the iTunes music store in conjunction with the introduction of the iPod.
Despite the loss of control over distribution, music creation and access to the media outlets that marketed and promoted music, the old model still persisted - artists still needed to go through the "label" to gain access, and only a limited number were let in under deal terms set by the labels.
For the first time in the history of the music industry the stranglehold created by access to distribution has been removed, via TuneCore Every artist now has access to worldwide distribution while keeping all their rights and getting all the money from the sale of their music.
