CD Baby Adds To Discussion On iTunes Live Times
(UPDATED)
Asked for his thoughts on the evolving story surrounding Ditto Music, 24-hour iTunes live times, TuneCore CEO Jeff Price's assertions, and Lee Parson's, co-founder of Ditto Music, rebuttal to Price, Tony van Veen, CEO of CD Baby had this to add to the discussion:
"CD Baby has worked hard on our internal processes to get artists’ titles processed and live the day they sign up, and iTunes has been great with their speedy listings of digital content lately. We haven’t promoted that until recently because we’re dependent on iTunes continuing to go live with new content within 24 hours, which is something we don’t control. However, for as long as iTunes keeps making tracks and albums live overnight, we’ll keep offering super fast iTunes delivery, which we know artists are clamoring for."
The thing that makes this whole discussion a quite pointless is that none of the aggregation companies own the distribution channel, Apple do. That means that the whoever delivers your tracks to Apple have no control whatsoever on live times.
Because digital distribution is a now a commodity, I can see why everyone in this space is trying to differentiate, however since they are currently trying to compete on something they don’t control none of the companies are going to come out on top by arguing about this topic.
Jeepers. Does anyone think this matters?
What happens in the future when none of this music sells and iTunes and others start to close the doors on distro by not hosting all this music that sells 1 copy a year?
I mean, does it make sense for iTunes and Amazon to rack up storage/hosting/bandwidth on music that doesn’t sell?
Do they lose money?
I agree with Simon,
At the end of the day, it is Apple that controls iTunes. Of course right now everything is going fluently with iTunes being updated. But what happens if iTunes decides to update their system again which reverts to a 2-4 week time period? Will distributors then have to revert back on their hard on promises to their artists?
Even though our brand WaTunes no longer offers digital distro, our new service Venzo Music (VMG) also have this ability (and we give our labels DIRECT access to iTunes!).
Is it fair to promote and make an announcement about a feature that is uncontrollable? Only to gain the prospects of artists? I don’t think so.
I don’t think artists are too concerned about how fast the content is live on iTunes but how effective their marketing & promotions are applied to their music from their distributors.
Kevin Rivers
CEO, Venzo Digital
Twitter: @kevin_rivers
Jeff,
None of the “smart” DSps care because they know there no real or long money in music downloads on their respective sides of the field….
Any so-called music business experts who read hypebot care to pull his coat on this one ; )