this ambient life

So after a visit to my Tax Person, I thought I would share how I fared last year in my endeavors of making music for fun and profit.

My biggest expense was upgrading to the new version of my DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) Logic for 200.00. Besides that was GoDaddy for my website and domain name for about 130.00 or so. Then I had to pay for the distribution of my CD’s. That comes out to about 50.00 give or take a few dollars. Other assorted expenses included office supplies for another 50.00. So my total expenses came out to about 430.00.

So how much did I make?

I use two distributors. For my first CD ‘Deep Energy 1′ and my two Folk CD’s I used CD Baby. Almost all of the sales came from the Deep Energy CD. CD Baby Paid me about 200.00, with the bulk of the sales split between Amazon and iTunes as you would imagine. For some reason CD Baby never sent my CD’s to E-Music, even after I e-mailed them and asked them to. This is the main reason that I don’t use CD Baby any more.

All of the other CD’s are distributed by TuneCore. I made about 400.00 from TuneCore.

Broken down it comes out to per unit:

200 full album downloads

75 single song downloads

300 songs streamed

By Dollar By Company:

iTunes Worldwide – 200.00

Amazon – 70.00

E-Music – 125

Assorted – 5

If you are doing the math in your head you are probably wondering how much I make per CD/Song. It all depends on who sells what CD… Sort of confusing. Except for the folk CD’s and Deep Energy 2, all of the CD’s are just one track, and Amazon sells one track CD’s as a single. So 5 of the 7 CD’s sell for only .99 at Amazon, and I make roughly 60-70% of that. The 60-70% is pretty much standard at all of the online retailers for what I receive from them. iTunes prices, pretty much, by the length of the track, so all of my CD’s are priced at 9.99. It’s an interesting system.

Streaming tracks make almost nothing for the artist. According to CD Baby when someone streams my tracks i get paid 0.00091…per track ….
So I made about 600.00 and had about 430.00 in expenses. As they say, ‘Don’t quit your day job’.

What is my outlook for this year? I’ve diversified what and how i’m selling my music which is showing dividends already. The biggest one would be selling my music as royalty free tracks, through www.ambientmusicgarden.com. They are a website that’s lets companies, hotels, spas etc buy music royalty free for one price. The other is my iPhone app, which I make about 1.35 per app, and i’m selling roughly 50 a month. I’ll be sending the new CD ‘Deep Energy 3′ to TuneCore in a few days and I have two more paid music release that should go out this year, including a 10-14 track CD.

So 2010 is looking better than 2009 money wise, depending on expenses. I would like to pick up Omnisphere, which is 500.00 so we will see…but I know I will be making enough to keep this one man music machine rolling ….

My son sent me this link. One of the producers for the Hurt Locker is banned from the Oscars….didn’t even know that was an option if someone screws up…

http://www.slashfilm.com/2010/03/03/negative-e-mails-producer-bans-and-lawsuits-the-hurt-lockers-tumultuous-path-towards-the-oscar/

Just found out Tom ‘T-Bone’ Wolk has passed away of a heart attack either last night or this morning…He played bass for Hall and Oates in their prime and also for the GE Smith led Saturday Night Live Band.  Condolences to his family.

I met Tom once.  It was at least 25 years ago.  I was working at Brookstone when they had a store in downtown Boston. He came in with his wife, and me being a very crappy beginning bass player, I recognized him immediately. I started talking to him about humidifiers that he was looking at and then I told him I recognized him and that I always looked forward to his column in Guitar for The Practicing Musician. He said he really appreciated the fact that I was reading him. I can’t remember if he bought anything, but I remember him being kind and sincere when he spoke to me. So I imagine that if he was kind to me, someone he didn’t know, I’m sure he was kind to everyone.

I found this at Yahoo music this morning. As an artist who makes royalties from streaming music, I found it interesting. The article doesn’t say how much they actually make per song …for me it’s usually about .002 cents per listen.

Can’t pay many bills that way …

Performers see tiny returns from streaming music

Reuters, Feb 26, 2010 11:31 pm PST

As the music business continues to watch traditional revenue streams slow or even evaporate, a good deal of faith often has been placed in what’s hailed as a panacea for the industry’s ills: online streaming.

But a Billboard analysis shows that even the amount of money earned by top artists from on-demand streams and noninteractive streams (such as Internet radio) is, in plain terms, shockingly low.

When Billboard calculated the rankings for its annual Money Makers report, the music trade magazine assigned a value to each digital download or song streamed based on information about labels’ licensing deals with those services and assumptions made about standard artist contracts.

The results show that of the more than 100 artists examined to compile the Money Makers list, only 10 made more than $2,000 from noninteractive streams in 2009, with Beyonce topping the list with an underwhelming $5,000. Only 25 artists made more than $1,000 from on-demand streams, with Michael Jackson topping that list — as the result of a barrage of interest after his death — with $10,000. Neither totals include any due publishing royalties and all are for U.S. activity only.

Compare that with the money that artists make from other digital channels. Digital album download sales generated sales of at least $200,000 for 13 artists, led by Jackson with $800,000, while another 26 sold $100,000 or more. Three acts pulled in more than $1 million in digital track sales for the year, led by Lady Gaga, with 33 making more than $100,000 from digital single sales.

Even tethered subscription downloads — tracks downloaded from services like Rhapsody that must have their licenses renewed monthly — showed better numbers. Nickelback, Jackson and Taylor Swift each made about $500,000 from such services, leading a field of 26 acts that earned in excess of $100,000.

NERVOUS OVER NUMBERS

So when pundits declare online streaming access to be the future of the music industry over buying and downloading music, it’s understandable that both artists and labels get a little nervous. It’s numbers like these that prompted Warner Music Group chairman/CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr. to take aim at the streaming model during the company’s recent first-quarter earnings conference call.

“Free streaming services are clearly not net positive for the industry, and as far as Warner Music is concerned, will not be licensed,” Bronfman said. “So the ‘get all your music you want for free, and then maybe with a few bells and whistles we can move you to a premium price’ strategy is not the kind of approach to business that we will be supporting in the future.”

These figures show why labels are so afraid of streaming services cannibalizing digital and physical sales. If artists and labels are already making less money from digital album sales than physical album sales, why would they want to replace that with digital streams that bring in even less?

The answer, of course, is that they may not have much of a choice. Labels might be tempted to dismiss the streaming model as unimportant or try to force fans to consume music differently. But the lessons of the original Napster, digital rights management and continuing online piracy are that it’s better to give consumers what they want than to fight them. If music fans want to access music through streaming services from multiple devices rather than buy and download files that they must transfer from device to another, the recording industry needs to figure out a way to make that happen.

The access-over-ownership model works only if it works for everyone — artist, label, service and fan. And while it holds great potential to drive significant music consumption and revenue, the results so far make it clear that there’s a long road ahead before either is realized.

Here is a great blog post about the birth of metal and the 40^th anniversary of the first Black Sabbath album ….

 http://google.com/gwt/n?u=http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2FbccTXh

When I was a kid I was a huge Iron Maiden fan. Looking back I’m not sure what it was that drew me to them. I guess it was that the music was fast, I thought Steve Harris, the bass player was the coolest guy on the face of the earth. I was learning to play bass as a teen, and I always would listen to his bass parts and try to learn them ….

The thing about maiden was that they were passionate about the music. You could tell that it was the most important thing to them …and it still is. I just watched a few weeks ago ‘Flight 666’ a documentary of Iron Maiden and them traveling literally around the world with their own equipment, playing football and soccer stadiums. Even after so many years, you could tell they were still passionate about playing and giving the best performance possible. And the fans in all of those countries were just as passionate seeing them and being part of the experience ….

Anyway…..salute to Metal!!

So my first music post is about the lead singer of the Knack. The reason this is interesting to me at least, is that I saw The Knack back in 1979 at the Orpheum in Boston, Ma. They basically played the entire album and a Beatles cover, if I’m not mistaken and the show was over in less than hour.

Here is a link to EW’s post on his death and a bunch of YouTube Videos …

The best thing that came out of that show was my love for the opening act ‘The Fools’. they had a couple of great mid 70′s albums Sold Out / Heavy Mental Great 70′s power pop, but they will always be remembered for being played on Dr. Demento with the song ‘Psycho Chicken’ a parody of the Talking Heads ‘Psycho Killer’ . It’s available as both Albums on one CD

Psycho Chicken wasn’t actuality on the album, it was a flexi single attached to the first album…anyway highly recommend…..

so…a new blog…I’m going to write about music. I make music. My music has it’s central location here www.jimbutlermusic.com It will take me a little while to get this set up the way I want, so please be patient and it should turn out ok. Very rarely if ever am I not listening to music. Right now I’m listening to Follow The Sun by Craig Chaquico (affiliate link to Amazon.com). He was the guitar player from Jefferson Starship. And that’s it for the moment. One post down, a bunch to go…