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Web site changes at Magnatune
A few recent events have made me think about changing some things at Magnatune. These events are:
- Walking around the Sxsw trade show and seeing many, many mp3 download sites exhibiting. They all sign up indie musicians and sell DRM-free music, and pay the artists decently. How is Magnatune different? Online Licensing, Listen-to-full-albums-for-free, Creative Commons, Internet Radio Stations & Podcasts are a few ways, but I don't think we do a good enough job differentiating ourselves
- Licensing is *really* taking off. We sold 75 music licenses last month, our best ever, and the upward trend is clear and dramatic.
- we're getting several dozen free album requests from students, commercial and non-commercial podcasts, and other requests for free stuff.
So, I made several business decisions recently, some of which went live on the site today:
- The "Listen, Love It, Buy It" slogan is gone, replaced with a simple "Music downloads & License" and a sub-line of "Listen all you want for free, then license our music online, or buy our MP3/WAV downloads". This highlights our licensing, but is also a reaction to all the email I get asking people to highlight the non-DRMness of Magnatune
- A paragraph describing what we do is on the home page: "Listen to over 500 hand-picked complete albums. If you like what you hear, download an album for as little as $5 (you pick the price), or buy a real CD, or license our music for commercial use. You'll get MP3s & WAVs, and no copy protection (DRM), ever."
- More controversially, I'm ending our "free perfect quality album for students and podcasters" promotion. What this means is that if you want a copy of the WAV files of an album, you'll need to spend at least $5 to buy it. If you can settle for 128k MP3s, you can download them for free, under the non-commercial license option, just as you've always been able to. Until today, if you were a student or podcaster, in addition to being able to freely download our 128k mp3s without contacting us, you could also email us and ask for a free full quality download of the album you were interested in. The problem with this policy is that we were getting dozens of requests every day from students for free albums and I have to pay someone to go through each request to see that it's sincere, and not someone just trying to cage a free album from us. That's expensive, and I'm not sure that paying someone to give free albums away is a good investment. As far as requests for free albums for podcasters go, a lot of requests are from commercial podcasts trying to get royalty free music, and it's really not worth arguing with them when a podcast license for a song is just $8. When it came to non-commercial podcasts, which I really do want to promote, my staff person had to check out their web site, make sure they're really non-commercial, and then send them the music. When we followed up, we found that less than one in five of the podcasters we'd given music to had actually played our music on their podcast. That's a lot of wasted effort, so I've decided that from now on, if you want a perfect quality version of an album, you need to spend at least $5 and buy it. If you're a non-commercial podcaster, you can play that audio on your podcast royalty free (and ASCAP/BMI free, too, under the Creative Commons license terms). It's a tough decision, but hopefully people who are disappointed with this change will realize that Magnatune needs to make money if it's going to survive, which means we can't always give things away for free.
Two new initiatives we're starting to work on, that will take about 4-6 months to launch:
- OnSiteMusic.com - a Magnatune spin-off company, that will focus exclusively on licensing music to stores and restaurants (ie, Muzak, only cool and not evil). This will also tie into our new wholesale-to-shops CD offering, letting stores sell our music, with their own packaging if they wish (ie, like Starbucks does)
- iLicenseMusic.com - a Magnatune spin-off company that will focus exclusively on music licensing. We believe some companies are confused or turned off by all the consumer offerings of Magnatune (downloads, CDs, podcasts, etc), and just want to get the music they need, and get on with their work.
Magnatune will continue to offer everything we do, but the Magnatune web site will continue to be crowded with options, and so I think that specialized sites that clearly do one thing well, are a good decision for the future.
Posted by John Buckman on April 1, 2007 at 06:04 PM | Permalink
Comments
For what it's worth, as a non-commercial podcaster who features Magnatune music...
...I'm not bothered in the least. Do what you gotta do. 128kbps freely available for us to play is still a Great Thing, an Awesome Thing, a Happy Happy Thing. So no sweat.
I'm bemused that right after I asked Shannon to add my show to the list of podcasts that frequently feature Magnatune artists, the list vanished from the web site, but hey. :)
Fear not. You're still awesome.
Random
Posted by: R. Francis Smith at Apr 1, 2007 9:49:00 PM
...I'm not bothered in the least. Do what you gotta do. 128kbps freely available for us to play is still a Great Thing, an Awesome Thing, a Happy Happy Thing. So no sweat.
Phew, thanks for your support!
I'm bemused that right after I asked Shannon to add my show to the list of podcasts that frequently feature Magnatune artists, the list vanished from the web site, but hey. :)
That's was me. There were only a dozen podcasts listed there, despite that there are hundreds of podcasts out there that play Magnatune music, so I cleared out the list because it seemed like an arbitrary selection, and clearly we're not very on top of the real list of podcasts playing our music. If you google "magnatune podcast" and go a few pages in (beyond our magnatune pages) you'll see that there are LOTS of podcasts using our music out there. Tons -- google does a better job of listing them than I ever will.
-john
Posted by: John Buckman of Magnatune at Apr 1, 2007 10:19:14 PM
John,
That makes perfect sense to me, and indeed, I think I could safely characterize my reasoning for asking to be listed as "if there's a list, and I'm not on it, it's like I'm not playing Magnatune music." Whereas if there's not a list... :) Makes sense to me.
Random
Posted by: R. Francis Smith at Apr 2, 2007 9:09:49 AM
I can't say I like the new slogan. Seems more complicated than it needs to be. As for the podcaster bit, I agree. It was good to do for a while to promote your label, but it was obvious that it couldn't be done forever. I'm sure you'll have other innovative marketing programs that will bring results as positive.
Posted by: Joe at Apr 2, 2007 9:29:20 AM
I have no problem with the new podcasting policy - I think that offering the 128 kbps mp3 files is quite generous. I plan to buy the high quality files as I did prior to the podcasting promotion. Your new plan makes good business sense..
Posted by: Eddie Dickey at Apr 2, 2007 3:09:56 PM
John,
I just thought I'd put in my two cents: I think the new directions sound like great ideas. Separating the licencing and the consumer halves of Magnatune will give them both much more room to grow. The slogan definitely seems like a mouthful, and I hope that it will stick with iLicenceMusic.com, while Magnatune could possibly return to Listen, Love It, Buy It.
Of course, I can't help but mention the iTunes/EMI anti-DRM movement. It's clear that iTunes is catching up in a big way and that part of Magnatune's appeal is not going to be as unique as it once was. Although Magnatune's catalog will be going up on iTunes from what I understand, I still think there's plenty of great stuff (i.e. streaming/pricing) to keep people coming directly to the site. As a musician, it's important that Magnatune stands out from the crowd.
In terms of content and implementation, I think Magnatune is as great as it's ever been, and the only real hurdle at this point is publicity. (Oh, and by the way, these are my observations after less than a year with Magnatune so take them with a grain of salt- or a few.) Hopefully with iTunes music store implementation a blurb could be added letting people know that full content streaming is available as well as variable pricing. Those two facts alone could bring the iTunes audience in for a closer look.
Anyway, those are my not-so-brief thoughts on the subject. Thanks for all the hard work John, I know we're in good hands.
-Justin
Posted by: Justin Bianco at Apr 3, 2007 5:32:39 PM
