promoting through iTunes

[RMJAZZ]

Can anyone shed some light on how I can be a featured artist on the iTunes home page..or any other page for that matter??? I have my music on iTunes through CDBABY, and love the tracking mechanisms on CDBABY!!!! I just need to maximise my downloads, and most of my audience members have iPODS.

Thank you for your time and expertise guys.

In Music,

Rob Maletick
CD Baby: ROB MALETICK: Hand In Hand
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[Derek Sivers]

Originally Posted by RMJAZZ

how I can be a featured artist on the iTunes home page

hi Rob!

The question is not that different from, "How can I be on the cover of Rolling Stone?" The iTunes Music Store is one of the most coveted spots in the music industry and everyone is fighting for it.

To Apple's credit, they really just pick stuff they feel best about. Those are not paid slots.

We have a full-time promotions person who has a great relationship with Apple and talks to them a few times a week, letting them know about CD Baby artists who have specific things going on. Quite a few times, this has resulted in front-page placement. Other times, out of the blue, they just tell us they'd like to feature someone on the front page that they just heard in our catalog and loved.

So, there's no science to it. But we're on it.

My best advice is to focus on facts and specifics, not your personal opinion of your music.

Instead of saying, "iTunes should feature me because I'm really good", try, "iTunes should feature me because my song is in the new ___ movie that opens in 3 weeks, and I'm the opening act on Norah Jones European tour."

And just to be mischevious, I'm going to give out our promotion guy's email here : he's ben@cdbaby.com and he's the senior employee at CD Baby. I've worked with him for 8 years and he's great. Feel free to email him about any specific events or pertinent facts that he could use to forward to our digital retail outlets like iTunes.

[PeterTuneCore]

Those spaces aren't available for money, RMJAZZ, they're driven editorially. iTunes puts up as features and thereabouts music they imagine will make them money, or that they like, or that they want to see surfaced, perhaps because they're part of larger or group-based promotions, etc.

That having been said, TuneCore works pretty closely with the iTunes folks, and several artists who used TuneCore were put up as Featured Artists! More and more all the time. We've found it's almost always the case that the more an artist or group does to promote themselves, the harder they work to get sales and attention, the more they wind up catching iTunes's eye.

--Peter
peter@tunecore.com

[Jeff Price]

To iTunes credit, they really do pick bands editorially. In the last 6 weeks, we have had two relatively unkown TuneCore customers featured as the free download "Single of the Week: on the iTunes main homepage.

In the past year, well over a hundred of our customers have been featured in various iTunes marketing vehicles. The most exciting part, 99% of them were "developing" artists. The other 1% were releases that TuneCore delivered by Jay Z, Keith Richards, Ziggy Marley, Izzy Stradlin etc.

When they first launched iTunes they held a "summit" at the Apple campus. Steve Jobs was presenting. When he was done, they opened the floor for questions.

I asked him about the promotional opportunities - in particular, if they would always be editorially selected or if they would move to model where they would be bought.

He stated they would always be editorially selected. I told him I did not believe him. He stated - and I quote - " We have 4 billion dollars in cash in the bank, we don't need the money. We are not going to wh*re ourselves out"

To his credit, Apple has lived up to its word, and the bands are benefitting!

Jeff Price
TuneCore
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