MySpace/Imeem Deal Leaves Thousands of Artists Unpaid

Independent artists who sold their music through imeem’s Snocap music storefronts on MySpace and other sites won’t be paid what’s owed even after MySpace Music’s acquisition of some — but not all — of imeem, Wired.com has learned.

MySpace Music bought “certain assets” from imeem, and they do not include imeem’s liability to more than 110,000 independent artists with Snocap storefronts, according to a source with inside knowledge of the deal. Those artists’ contracts mandate they be paid each month if they’re owed more than $20. Some artists have been owed money for more than a year, and the chance of them seeing any money now is, for all intents and purposes, zero, the source says.

Artists attempting to get paid for songs sold through Snocap stores — many or most of which were on MySpace itself — must get in line with imeem’s bank and other creditors. MySpace Music paid less than $1 million for imeem, so it’s doubtful much will remain for the artists.

“MySpace Music bought a limited set of imeem’s assets including the domain name and certain technology and trademarks,” a MySpace spokeswoman said in an e-mail to Wired.com. “The asset sale to MySpace Music was part of a foreclosure process which resulted from the lien certain secured creditors had on all the assets of imeem. MySpace Music did not acquire imeem’s outstanding debts, including the money imeem owed to artists under the Snocap relationship. Upon closing, users trying to access the Imeem website were redirected to MySpace Music. We did not acquire imeem’s contracts or relationships as we have our own in place. MySpace Music has its own distribution platform, which includes relationships with prominent aggregators and indie labels, that provides indie artists ways to monetize their music on our site.”

One source with inside knowledge of the deal said MySpace Music’s rushed purchase of imeem’s assets forced it to “leave behind anything that either had explicit liability or potential liability,” including Snocap and its debts to thousands of independent artists and bands.

Napster creator Shawn Fanning co-founded Snocap in 2002 to let artists sell their music through an embeddable storefront widget. At one point, the service was marketed as the exclusive way for artists to sell music on MySpace. Imeem bought Snowcap last summer. But because MySpace left most aspects of Snocap out of its acquisition of imeem’s assets, all 110,000 or so of those storefronts are gone. The server that hosts them is offline and so is the Snocap website.

Possibly the last band to be paid by imeem for music sold through a Snocap store embedded on MySpace was Javelin, which happens to be my brother’s and cousin’s band. After they inquired about money listed as owed in its online account, imeem sent them a check for about $400 for approximately a year and a half of sales.

That may not be “a princely sum,” as Tim Quirk put it. But for growing bands — many of whose income trickles in from a variety of sources — it matters, especially when you consider that imeem’s payments to major labels helped drive it out of business in the first place.

There’s nothing technically wrong with MySpace Music only acquiring certain assets from imeem, and teams of lawyers scrutinized the deal before it was done. Regardless, in this latest round of digital musical chairs, independent artists who set up music stores in good faith have been left holding the bag.

Making the Most Out of Online Resources

Written by Daylle Deanna Schwartz
Author of "Start & Run Your Own Record Label" and "I Don’t Need a Record Deal!"
© 2009 All Rights Reserved. Used By Permission

Indie artists often complain about not having the budget they’d like to market and promote their music. Nowadays, digital marketing offers a plethora of opportunities for marketing yourself and your music that doesn’t cost anything in dollars. But, it can be hard to know where to begin—and end. While much of it is good for those of you with small to no money budgets, there’s still a big expense for taking advantage of so many opportunities—TIME.

The good AND the bad news: the cost to break an independent act can be more in time than in dollars. It’s great to have free tools! But you could spend all of your waking hours going onto all the different social networking sites and other avenues of promotion and still not make a dent. With all the artists and labels vying for online attention, you must work to make your music stand out.

It’s important to brand your name online. The more people see it, the more curiosity can be generated, which leads to potential fans or clients checking you out. The more you respond to fans who write to you, the more loyal fans you’ll have. But so much of the efforts to find fans is one by one, which accounts for a lot of the time you need to put into it.

It’s not enough to just register on all the websites. While there’s unlimited space for everyone online, you can get lost in it all and not make any constructive progress. I know. I’m always getting links to sites I “should check out.” People email me both to my server and on the social networking sites. It gets overwhelming. Another day ends and I haven’t done any writing. So I must get tough with myself in order to function.

Time isn’t FREE when it costs you your sleep, your personal life and even your sanity. But you can take control of online activities to make the most of the best opportunities. Here are so DOs and DON’Ts for getting the most out of your online resources.

DON’T jump around to everything that seems interesting or the new flavor of the month.
DO force yourself to stay on track. Put aside things you want to check out for when you have some time or accept you can’t look over everything. Learn the benefits of hitting DELETE.

DON’T immediately answer emails when they come in or click when you get a link.
DO: Prioritize what most needs to be done at this point. I have a NEED TO ANSWER folder and put personal emails and those asking questions into it. Have a block of time set aside when all you do is answer emails. When time is up, leave the rest for the next block!

DON’T jump from one site to another and register with every one you can.
DO plan your direction carefully and prioritize your needs to work them properly. Social networking sites allow musicians to seek fans out and interact with them. But working one or two hard is strongly advised as opposed to doing a little bit on many. If you have too many, you don’t work anything well and you can spread yourself too thin. Decide which sites are best for you and concentrate your energy to build up relationships with fans on them.

DON’T try to do everything yourself. DO mobilize fans to help. Get volunteers to assist you in following up with online activities. Ask them to tell other musicians on the site about you, use your music as their default on their MySpace page and drive potential fans to your sites. If you have a budget, hire an online marketing specialist to direct your efforts and do some of the legwork.

DON’T register with any social networking site that you’re not prepared to follow up with.
DO answer every email and make your presence known. Respond to comments. Nowadays, when people hear an artist they like or see you perform, they’ll leave a comment on your MySpace page. It’s important to respond. Musicians who keep in touch with their fans religiously build the strongest communities and get the most support.

DON’T focus just on MySpace and Facebook.
DO diversify. While pure social networking sites are great to exploit, get your music in places where people can find it. Do as many things as you can that don’t require constant attention that give your music potential exposure. Create iMixes up in the iTunes music store. Get your music into streaming radio sites, such as Last.fm, Pandora, Launch, iLike, etc. Send it to MP3 bloggers who review your genre of music. Post videos on YouTube. And get yourself on wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia. These efforts often just require doing something once and can drive people to find your music.

DON’T think that selling and promoting your music online is all you need.
DO everything you can in real life too. Touring is still important for creating a strong connection with fans. People do live a good part of their lives off the computer so follow traditional promotion routes too.

DON’T put all your energy into inviting people you don’t know to be your friend or worry about having big numbers of them.
DO be more concerned with connecting to real fans. Successful artists say they don’t worry about how many friends they have on MySpace. What’s important is that they’re real fans who care about reading bulletin posts and getting invitations to your gigs. Of course you can invite people to be your friend if you want to know them. But do that with an email to introduce yourself so they know who you are and why you’re requesting them as a friend. Just inviting for the sake of upping your numbers is a waste of time these days. I don’t have thousands of friends on MySpace but every one of them came to me. I like that better! www.myspace.com/Daylle

Before you begin, make sure you’re ready to commit the time. Even with limits, you’ll spend hours a day keeping up. Find sites that are the likeliest to reach your audience and work them with a vengeance. Take advantage of every function they offer. Join relevant communities. Interact on them as much as you can so people get to know you. Eventually some will come to your page and hear your music.

Being online can be a full time job and you might only have a limited amount of time to devote. ReverbNation www.reverbnation.com has many helpful tools that can save you a lot of time and maximize your online reach. Some people hire a promoter to do it for them. If you don’t have a budget, I highly advise that you put aside time every day to work this new model for marketing and promoting music online, with a real plan.

Easy Way to Add Friends to MySpace!

Are You Wired for Tomorrow?

The information age is at hand. This is a great video that has some really interesting facts. These facts can be considered and used to help advance your art. Call it a better understanding...

Bands Favoring Web Over Major Labels

Thousands of fans. A jam-packed tour schedule. A CD for sale. And no record label behemoth behind it all?

That’s today’s music business, according to Chris Bowes, the drummer for the Connecticut band Columbia Fields. And such independent success is fast becoming music industry standard for up-and-coming musical acts trying to build a brand, a following and a sound.

Columbia Fields, whose sound Bowes describes as a sort of Dave Matthews Band meets John Mayer, is among a growing number of musical groups making music independently, without a record label.

All on its own, Columbia Fields has amassed more than 14,000 fans on Myspace.com, booked shows in venues across the state and landed airtime on local radio stations WTIC 96.5 FM and KISS 95.7.

Over the past decade, the music industry has changed. It used to be that a band needed a record label to hit it big. Labels had the power to finance, distribute and promote new music.

New Opportunities
But starting with the days of Napster, technology has given emerging acts new opportunities. Now, artists can amass a substantial following through Internet music downloads, social networking sites like Myspace.com and individual artist Web sites. They can produce CDs in the comfort of home and sell them through online record stores like Cdbaby.com.

“I’m one of those guys who, when I was a kid, always saw myself up on stage, playing in front of thousands of people,” said Bowes, who’s been with Columbia Fields for about two years. The band’s first CD, “When the Night Falls,” has sold about 750 copies at shows and through online distribution with Cdbaby.com.

“The industry’s a little different now,” he added. “Bands don’t necessarily need labels to get in front of large audiences.”

“The heart of all the [industry] changes is definitely technology, bottom line,” said Adam Gootkin, co-owner of the recording studio Onyx Soundlab in Manchester. Half of his studio’s business is with major labels, artists and corporations, like Dell; the other half is with independent artists.

Gootkin’s latest project is a new track for R&B artist Brandy.

Marketing Tools
The music industry is going all digital, said Gootkin. Album sales are down, he added, and that means less income for labels, which are set up to sell CDs. Without the need for distribution, record labels become little more than banks, he said. Large labels have yet to adjust their business model to fit the digital times.

Declining revenues from CD sales has had one immediate impact on the industry, namely that labels are becoming more selective in whom they choose to sign, Gootkin said. That means musicians who are looking for the financial backing of a major record label need to come to them prepared, pre-packaged with an image, a brand and a following, he said.

“The closer you are to helping them see the vision, the closer you are to getting a deal,” Gootkin said.

Part of that challenge for young musicians is marketing, said Sheri Ziccardi, public relations manager for The Hartt School, the arts school at the University of Hartford. Ziccardi has spent years helping students in creative fields market themselves. The tools certainly have evolved, she said.

“Thinking about marketing and promoting themselves can be a challenge for creative types, who do not necessarily want to think about the ‘business’ side of the industry they choose to enter,” Ziccardi said in an e-mail. “Fortunately, today’s students have been raised in a techno-heavy culture and are comfortable with utilizing technology for self-expression and communication, so marketing themselves may become easier for them in some ways than it was for their predecessors.”

Staying Independent
If musicians can grasp the ins and outs of the industry, staying independent can be a viable option.

Music industry veteran and songwriting instructor Bill Pere maintains that it only takes a band about 10,000 fans to be able to make music full-time and remain independent of a label. He’s seen it happen, when musicians are industry-savvy.

“A person is now able to get their material to a wide audience,” said the Mystic-based Pere, who has put out 16 CDs but makes most of his royalties from digital downloads. “The trade-off is that in the old school … the record label basically does everything for you,” he added. “And all you have to do is your music.”

But artists attached to a label get a small piece of the pie, if anything at all, he said.

For example, a band signs a contract with a label and gets a $500,000 advance to make an album. Any royalties that come from the sale of the resulting album must first go to pay back that advance, Pere said.

“If you don’t sell enough, you don’t get anything,” Pere said. “It takes a heck of a lot of sales to make any money.”

Keeping Profits
The independent market doesn’t offer the connections or the budget. “But you get to keep 100 percent of everything you make,” said Pere, who has remained independent throughout his musical career. “You are the one issuing contracts to other people to do work the way you want it done.”

Downloadable music has also created the need for a more strategic approach to songwriting, Pere said. Sometimes listeners only get to sample the first 30 seconds of a song before deciding whether or not to purchase it. Long intros won’t get a song downloaded; those first 30 seconds have to rock.

“It’s a totally transformed world, with its good sides and bad sides,” he added. “It’s not a matter or right or wrong. It’s about having your eyes wide open.”

43 Million Reasons to Use MySpace.com

by Andre Calilhanna, Discmakers

The indie music universe is constantly waning and expanding: new bands emerge, old ones dissolve, conferences come and go, new web sites pop up as older ones fall out of fashion. As with any other industry or business model, these indie music offerings fail and succeed with their ability to create and meet market demand for their service.

Enter MySpace.com. Incorporating successful elements of MP3.com and IUMA, and eclipsing PureVolume and Friendster as the place to be online, MySpace is the epitome of what an online community can be. In it’s short life it has adapted and evolved to meet the evolving needs of its user base, and it has expanded to a network of over 43 million users in the process. Thanks, in large part, to the bands.

Billionaire Boys Club, from Jersey City, NJ, boast the distinction of being the first band ever to grace the front page of MySpace. Through good timing and good tunes, BBC caught the attention of MySpace co-founder Tom Anderson and ushered in a new wrinkle in the MySpace universe. The band is still listed as one of Anderson’s MySpace favorites.

Fireflight, from Orlando, FL, recently signed to Flicker Records, and attribute a lot of their growing fan base to their efforts and presence on MySpace. Through their page on MySpace, the band sees continuous growth and interest, which should only increase as they release their album in July and start playing a full regimen of shows.

We sat down with these two indie music veterans and gleaned some insights into the finer points of MySpace marketing. Here’s our list of five phenomenal reasons to use MySpace!

1. Super-targeted viral marketing.
2. Communication runs both ways.
3. Motivated fans.
4. Crossover marketing opportunities.
5. Free marketing is the best marketing ever!

Super-Targeted Viral Marketing
One of the tenets of good marketing is to target your market. You wouldn’t pitch your Crunk Speed-Metal band with an ad in Today’s Grandparent magazine. The idea is to figure out who your market is, find out where they are, develop your message, then figure out how to get that message in front of the people who might want to buy what you’re selling.

MySpace delivers this in spades. Pockets and niches of users, called “friends,” gather around each other and share info on bands they like. For instance, let’s say you like My Chemical Romance. You can go check out their site, listen to their music, and read their blog. Then, if you want to find bands with a similar sound, you can check out the band’s friends, which include a host of other bands. Presumably, these are bands that have something in common with My Chemical Romance, so you go and check them out.

There are also fans listed as friends, and they typically have a bunch of bands on their pages. So someone into My Chemical Romance will have a number of other bands posted. You might be interested in checking some of them out. It’s viral marketing in its purest form, and the friend network is what really sets MySpace apart from other band sites.

It’s also why Isac Walter, who does marketing and programming for MySpace, says major labels are clamoring to get their bands on the site. “With 43 million users, it’s almost better than going to TV, what with the way people watch TV nowadays. People come to this site to discover new music, and what better way to expose an artist than to leak a band to this audience?”

As a band, this works the other way, too. Once you start developing a fan base, you can communicate to them when you have a show or a news event to broadcast. MySpace provides a service where you can target the friends you contact by region.

Billionaire Boys Club, from Jersey City, NJ
“They added this feature,” says Leigh Nelson of BBC, “where you can set up an event, and you can say I want to invite all my friends in a radius of x number of miles from this zip code. So we’ll do a show in New York and set up an invitation and invite all of our friends within 50 or 100 miles of the city. So we’re directly targeting that audience, where with email you end up sending show announcements to people in Germany. These are things that get added one little bit at a time. Tom really seems to get how people are using MySpace and what they want to do with it, and they’re always adding functionality based on that.”

Communication Runs Both Ways
The internet has completely changed the way we communicate, particularly in terms of marketing. Take something as simple as a band mailing list, for instance. In the early 90’s, that meant printing post cards, labeling them, putting stamps on them, and lugging it all to the post office weeks before the gig. It sounds like the Dark Ages, doesn’t it? It cost a bunch of money, and fans could only communicate by seeing you at a show or writing a letter. Email changed all that. Now it’s free to email your announcement, fans can immediately reply, and you don’t need to plan your promotion months in advance.

MySpace has taken that even further. MySpace not only allows you to communicate with your fans quickly and cost effectively, but it allows them to communicate with you and each other.

Fans can tell you what they think of everything on your page – a picture, a song, a blog entry – and their response is posted immediately. They can then spread your news to their friends with a couple of keystrokes. It’s an amazing development, and there are many ways to take advantage of it to create drama and stir up a buzz.

Fireflight, from Orlando, FL
“We started leaking the news about our signing to Flicker on MySpace because we knew people were going to be reading our blog,” says Justin Cox of Fireflight, “but we got way more response than we thought we would. That generated more interest in our page than anything had in a long time. You could see us singing a contract but you didn’t know with who, and that blog is the most visited we have. We put it on our regular site, too, but we don’t have it set up where people can comment, so it’s cool to know that so many people were keeping track and were genuinely interested.”

There are examples of bands booking shows to meet the demand of their MySpace fans, tells Walter. “There’s this band Cut Copy from Australia who did the Franz Ferdinand tour, and when they played Los Angeles they had enough people on MySpace saying, ‘Oh I wish you were playing your own show!’ So they booked a show at a smaller club called The Echo and gave discounts to their MySpace friends and sold the place out. Bands like that who keep in contact and get a little more personal with their audience can really have success.”

And Nelson explains that opportunities are coming to them by way of MySpace. “We used to get a decent amount of fan email, but now all those comments are pretty much coming exclusively from MySpace. Also coming in are show offers, booking people who are interested, soundtracks who are interested in songs… a lot of that comes via MySpace. It makes us more likely to follow up, too, because we can get a better idea of who these people are by looking at their page.”

Motivated fans who find you and help promote you
Indie bands need help. It’s a lot of work to do promotion, book gigs, sell merch, rehearse, write, and do the hundreds of little details involved with a band. Street teams and helpful fans have been the solution to much of that, though not always easy to assemble and coordinate. MySpace, with its younger demographic and infectious network qualities, makes it easier to find folks ready to jump on and paint your bandwagon. Sometimes, the band doesn’t even know it happening.

“We have this banner on our MySpace page,” explains Cox. “I was surprised to find that people who were our friends were taking it and posting it on other people’s MySpace pages, trying to drive traffic to us. So let’s say there was no MySpace and you had a web site, and you had that same banner. It’s cool, but what are people going to do with it? Now that we’ve got MySpace, they take those banners and post them as comments on other people’s pages and blogs, and people read the blogs and then automatically they’re going to your site for no other reason than that it’s there.”

Finding where your MySpace fans are coming from can lead to unexpected market research, like expanding your gig radius based on fan input. “I can search for BBC across the whole site and see how many people have added us and said we’re one of their favorite bands,” says Nelson. “It’s really cool to see fans crop up in markets we’ve never even been to. All of a sudden we see there are a lot of friends in upstate New York, we get in touch with them and find out where we should play and then go do some shows. In the past there was no way to find that kind of information.”

Crossover Marketing
At its best, one marketing endeavor feeds another, and spills into your other efforts. As Walter says, “The bands who promote their MySpace pages become the biggest bands on MySpace, hands down.” By linking from your regular web site, adding your MySpace URL to all your stickers, t-shirts, etc., you drive people to your site, and more likely broadcast to all those MySpace users that you’re on there, too.

It also works in reverse. MySpace traffic drives traffic to your regular web site, and people to your shows. “Traffic on our site has increased drastically as well,” says Cox, “and I’m sure that has something to do with MySpace because it’s been a steady ramp since we’ve been on there.

“I can also remember instances specifically where people have come up to me at a show and say they heard us on MySpace and decided to come check us out, which to me is the best. It’s just a big network and a big word of mouth kind of thing and you can’t get that kind of exposure unless you’re playing shows every night. It’s just been this awesome marketing tool.”

Free Marketing is the Best Marketing Ever!
Sounds obvious, and it is! But it can’t be understated or undervalued. Many of the band web sites out there offer great services, and there’s no reason not to be on every site you can get to. MySpace has the unique distinction, though, of offering just about everything you could imagine wanting all under one roof: a potential fan base, an opportunity to broadcast your music, a place to hang your photos, a web presence with a decent amount of customization… the list goes on. Not to mention the features and functions that allow you to be a smart marketer.

“The thing that sets MySpace apart from sites that are just for bands,” touts Nelson, “is people sign onto MySpace every day, just to check their messages, read, and communicate. I use it every day, to check in and see what’s going on, look for any bulletins from bands, figure out what’s going on tonight in the city. So just by putting your journal or show dates or advertisements and songs up there, you’re simply going to get a lot more exposure than people just randomly checking your web site. People spend more time on it than anywhere else. I guess credit to Tom there, for setting it up in such a way that makes it so addictive!”