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Digital
Believe offer discounts in response to Tunecore price hike
By CMU Editorial | Published on Thursday 26 May 2011
Now, there’s been a fair few angry reactions online from various parts of the grass roots music community to the news, earlier this month, that US-based independent digital distributor TuneCore was hiking its prices for distributing digital albums from twenty dollars per album per year to fifty dollars.
Some artists who use the service to get their content onto digital stores and platforms expressed anger at the 150% price increase, the notice period they’d been given of the change (four to six weeks, depending who you ask), and the slightly threatening tone of the email sent out about the price hike, which almost gleefully pointed out – albeit correctly – that if an artist moved to one of TuneCore’s competitors they’d lose any reviews and ratings associated with their releases on digital stores, and probably experience some downtime during the switch.
Nevertheless, many of TuneCore’s competitors in the grass roots digital distribution space subsequently announced special deals in a bid to make their rival’s altered pricing look even more unreasonable. The latest to do so is European set up Zimbalam, the spin off from Believe Digital that provides distribution services to start-up artists. They announced yesterday that they were offering a five pound discount, so that the first year fee for distributing an album would be £25. Subsequent years are charged at £20 per year, but only if enough royalties are generated to cover the fee.
Announcing the discount, Believe Digital MD Stephen King told CMU: “Our original intention with Zimbalam was to help to level the playing field in the digital music market. We cover the major stores, in all countries, and give artists and labels access to 95% or more of the market in their local territory, for all genres of music. It is important therefore not to price new talent out of the market by charging fees beyond their means. Artists and labels are charged a simple, one-off annual fee to use the Zimbalam service and can release their music on their own terms while retaining full control of their rights, creative decisions and revenue”.
Directly referencing the TuneCore price hike, he continued: “While our competitors are increasing their prices by over 150% we are fully committed to helping nuture and develop new talent and will do everything in our means, including offering significant discounts on our fees if necessary to make sure emerging artists and labels continue have access to a world class route to market”.
We should add that TuneCore last week claimed their price increase had been misrepresented, adding that as part of the pricing restructure various add-on services that had previously been charged as extras were now incorporated into the basic rate. CEO Jeff Price told reporters: “TuneCore customers now get distribution to an unlimited number of stores (as opposed to a per-store fee), an unlimited number of songs per album (instead of extra per-song fees), faster upload times, and expanded accounting systems”.
