urSESSION Pre Launch, Last.FM to pay Artist Royalties, Amie Street
urSESSION Pre-launch
To tell you the truth I had pretty much forgotten about urSession because it was supposed to go live late last year, but to my surprise I received an email inviting me to join the pre-launch of their site over the weekend. What is urSession? UrSession is a “revolutionary” website/label envisioned by Shavo Odadjian (System of a Down bass player) that features user generated and rated content. Artists and Bands can upload music and/or videos showing off their band or individual talents. Other users can then vote for and or rate this uploaded content. An online talent show or just an online version of American Idol? The winner(s) will get a chance at a urSession label deal.
The site is kind of ugly, looking like a rocked out version of myspace, however everything seemed to work well and I did not find many bugs. I signed up for my account and even uploaded a few songs. Instantly I was bombarded with 5 “urCommunity” friend requests from bands in various musical genres, and I even received one comment from one of them (which after I looked around, was the same comment they left everyone else). So during my first 5 minutes on the site, I could see that the spam is going to be right up there with myspace. Granted these users seemed legit, but the site is not even live yet so it is only going to get worse.
Last.FM To pay Artists Royalties
Last.fm announced this weekend that it has released a new on-demand service that allows users to listen to their favorite bands full-length tracks and entire albums for free. Good news for listeners, but also good news for the artists as Last.fm will then pay royalties to the artist per play. You can read the entire announcement on the Last.fm blog.
Amie St.
Amie Street is not a new site, but if you are an artist trying to break into the webosphere then you should definitely check it out. Amie Street is in my mind a revolutionary site, with one of the coolest business models I have ever seen. At first the site looks just like another well designed social networking music oriented site, but it is not. Any artist/band can upload music which is instantly available as a free download. This might scare artists or bands, but hey if you want to get your music out there, then giving a couple copies away for free is something you have to do. Each time a song is downloaded though, the price jumps up. So even though the first download is free, the next one will not be. The maximum amount you can pay for a download is $0.98. If a user downloads and recommends a free track that later goes on to be popular then that user receives “street credit” which can be turned into money for downloading more music. So not only does the artist get paid, so does the listener who has the ear for discovering great new music. Pretty cool eh? I should note that the artist does not receive all of the money from purchases. The first $5.00 per song goes to Amie Street for a “maintenance/hosting fee”.
One tip I can offer artists using Amie Street is to not upload your entire library of tunes all at once. Upload a few songs (or only one album if you have a few albums). This will help you develop a fan base, and then once you upload a new song these new fans are automatically emailed letting them know you have uploaded new music. When you upload new music your band will also displayed on the “new music” section for your genre so new users will also be able to find you there.