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PeterTuneCore · 27th January 2006

Hi Peter and fellow Gearslutz,

Thanks for asking about TuneCore. We're about 24 hours into being a live service, and it's a crazy time. If all gear came with as many bugs as a new commerce website, musicians would never compose a single note! The fires are mostly out, and it looks like everything is working.

TuneCore is a pretty exciting place with an idea we really feel strongly about: artists maintaining control over their own destinies. It's all fine and good for the major labels to swing deals that get CDs onto shelves at Tower and HMV and WalMart, but how can an independent artist do it without singing a deal and with it huge chunks of their potential earnings and rights? It's even more unfair if you think about digital shelves, where space is infinite. It's possible to get there now, but the price tends to be very high, either up front (hundreds, even thousands of dollars) or off the back (percentages of your future earnings). Worse, you have to sign exclusive deals, and sometimes you have to give up your very masters and copyrights. In return, you get promised marketing and promotion that sometimes fails to materialize at all.

So we founded TuneCore. The idea was to make the price so low even a teenager in a garage with his brother's leftover equipment could afford. $0.99 a song? $7.98 an album? $0.99 per album for each digital store, with iTunes U.S. thrown in for free? That's not prohibitive. A good supply of mag tape and a spare box of guitar picks might cost what an average album costs to put into iTunes. But price isn't really such a big deal--you folks already spend tons of money on gear. Even the most glancing hobby musician probably has reasonable cash to spare.

The big thing is, we're a delivery and storage service. We truck your music to the digital retailers, then truck back the money and the data as it comes. We figure we've no right to a piece of your earnings or control over your music, anymore than FedEx might charge you ten cents for every CD you sell just for delivering it to Sam Goody for sale. And we don't deserve to own the rights to your music just for getting it out to the public.

So it's a delivery fee and a small yearly maintenance and storage fee, so we can deliver your music over and over to new services (and we have a copy so we can deliver your music again, if the digital retailer loses it).

That's the 50,000 foot view. It's a philosophy and a service. We hope both will appeal to musicians and artists who've been held up by the "gatekeepers" to distribution, forced to turn over potential revenue, rights or even whole masters, just to get the chance to compete.

If you folks have any questions about TuneCore or how digital delivery aggregators, iTunes or the digital publishing world works, I'd be happy to answer them. Post them here so everyone can read them, or if it's something super-double-secret, you can drop me an email at info@tunecore.com.

Thanks! And here's my gear: a Casio SK-1. Fear this keyboard! It's got a sampling microphone. It's got two whole octaves. Scary.

--Peter

Peter Wells
COO
TuneCore.com

27th January 2006	#2
PeterTuneCore Peter Wells, SVP Operations, Customer Advocate - Tunecore Joined: Jan 2006 Posts: 91	Hi from TuneCore Hi Peter and fellow Gearslutz, Thanks for asking about TuneCore. We're about 24 hours into being a live service, and it's a crazy time. If all gear came with as many bugs as a new commerce website, musicians would never compose a single note! The fires are mostly out, and it looks like everything is working. TuneCore is a pretty exciting place with an idea we really feel strongly about: artists maintaining control over their own destinies. It's all fine and good for the major labels to swing deals that get CDs onto shelves at Tower and HMV and WalMart, but how can an independent artist do it without singing a deal and with it huge chunks of their potential earnings and rights? It's even more unfair if you think about digital shelves, where space is infinite. It's possible to get there now, but the price tends to be very high, either up front (hundreds, even thousands of dollars) or off the back (percentages of your future earnings). Worse, you have to sign exclusive deals, and sometimes you have to give up your very masters and copyrights. In return, you get promised marketing and promotion that sometimes fails to materialize at all. So we founded TuneCore. The idea was to make the price so low even a teenager in a garage with his brother's leftover equipment could afford. $0.99 a song? $7.98 an album? $0.99 per album for each digital store, with iTunes U.S. thrown in for free? That's not prohibitive. A good supply of mag tape and a spare box of guitar picks might cost what an average album costs to put into iTunes. But price isn't really such a big deal--you folks already spend tons of money on gear. Even the most glancing hobby musician probably has reasonable cash to spare. The big thing is, we're a delivery and storage service. We truck your music to the digital retailers, then truck back the money and the data as it comes. We figure we've no right to a piece of your earnings or control over your music, anymore than FedEx might charge you ten cents for every CD you sell just for delivering it to Sam Goody for sale. And we don't deserve to own the rights to your music just for getting it out to the public. So it's a delivery fee and a small yearly maintenance and storage fee, so we can deliver your music over and over to new services (and we have a copy so we can deliver your music again, if the digital retailer loses it). That's the 50,000 foot view. It's a philosophy and a service. We hope both will appeal to musicians and artists who've been held up by the "gatekeepers" to distribution, forced to turn over potential revenue, rights or even whole masters, just to get the chance to compete. If you folks have any questions about TuneCore or how digital delivery aggregators, iTunes or the digital publishing world works, I'd be happy to answer them. Post them here so everyone can read them, or if it's something super-double-secret, you can drop me an email at info@tunecore.com. Thanks! And here's my gear: a Casio SK-1. Fear this keyboard! It's got a sampling microphone. It's got two whole octaves. Scary. --Peter Peter Wells COO TuneCore.com