Martin Orford August 2009

yea, I'm glad too that it has been more educational than "I you you are but what am I" type conversation.

I'm a technologist at heart, I've been writing software since the late 70's, I spearheaded all the major development at every company I worked for and have had my own software company the past 10 years.  I even designed an on demand video download system in the mid-80's that sadly couldn't work due to storage and bandwidth requirements that just didn't exist at the time.  So I watch the market pretty closely, which is why I built Mindawn 5 years ago as part of that.  Right now though, we are in the middle of a sea change with digital and broadcast radio and various other forms of media consumption.  How this shakes out is going to take a few years to tell for sure.  The bottom line is you have to get eyes on your product, either by ads, reviews, live, viral videos, what have you.  A lot of these tools have only really come in to play in the last couple years, look at how fast Twitter exploded this year after being around for a while with little interest (I find it creepy myself).

You see a resurgence with Vinyl lately, this tells you something about "quality" consumers of music.  The problem is kids today only hear low quality MP3 files on earbuds, they don't know what high fidelity is.  Games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero have had an unexpected impact in introducing younger kids to music we enjoyed decades ago (my son became a huge fan of Clapton, Eric Johnson, Kansas and Heart to name a few because of it).

So that's a long way of saying we're at a stage in development that makes it pretty impossible to predict, all we can do is watch and react quickly or take the lead in some cases.

I thought our album price of $8.99 for a lossless, DRMless recording was pretty good, I've seen more and more people copy us.  The whole thing is a balancing act between what is fair for the artist and for the customer.  Mindawn has a slew of prog material you simply can't get on any other download service.  My other problem with the typical model was they would charge the same price for a song, regardless of the length.  Is it fair for Echolyn to get $.50 for Mei for example?

As a reward system though, Mindawn has "Mindawlers" where you basically earn points back like the Discover Card and are able to get free albums after a bit.

sorry, I must have missed your question.  The problem with eMusic or any "all you can eat" type of service is you pay a low flat rate for virtually unlimited access and that gets split up with every artist you purchased from.  The first time I saw a digital says report with payments of even less than 1 penny, so of course it is rounded down and you get nothing, they seem to play a trick where they do the rounding on individual sales instead of all your sales, so say you had a cumulative $10 in profits, you'd get nothing because they were all a fraction of a cent.  Part of this applies to places like MySpace that monetize your songs that are playing by having ads on your page, but you have NO control over what they do.  I had them override my 2 minute song sample with the entire song, I can't change it and I don't want the entire song on there, my only option is to opt out entirely.

Services like my Mindawn pay a 75% royalty, this is to whoever put the material up, the artist or the label, obviously the more middlemen you have, the less you get.  Take iTunes as an example, you have an artist, the label, a propogator and then iTunes, everyone is getting their piece of it, so the artist doesn't see a whole lot, however there usually aren't expenses to recoup from it, so it's nearly free money.

Why do people end up on eMusic?  Because the sign up with a propagator and don't pay attention to the details.  I'm pretty certain those types of services will go away as more people notice.

You're ignoring the thought excersize, you already live in a country that is making it impossible for you to publish your book for example, but you still live there.

Mindawn, the label that has Brighteye links to it, but we probably could do some new advertising.

as to percentages, it's something like 5x less than a couple albums ago.

Here is my problem with everyone saying musicians should come up with a new model.  They are musicians, that's what they do, they make music, it isn't beholden on them to come up with some groundbreaking technology or economic model so they can sell their product, these guys mostly can barely understand their royalty reports, not that they are stupid, but because accounting isn't their focus.  Do we ask a rancher to give us the beef and just put advertising on the side of the cow to support it?  I don't understand why musicians are the only ones being demanded that they find some method other than selling their goods to be able to continue to do it.  

The fan supported revenue thing or the 'pay what you want' model only works a couple times or possibly with established bands, Martin spoke about this in the interview.  You think one of my bands like Invisigoth could get people to pony up 10k to support them recording another album?