Next Big Sound (a/o May 16th):
Re: I'm Jeff Price. And I'm Ready to Talk About My TuneCore Departure...
As a band member and music producer, I was one of the early users and champions of Tunecore. I referred them to many fellow musicians, and it seemed like the fairest business model for digital distribution at the time. They seemed pro-artist. Then they--whether it was Jeff Price or the investors--literally changed their tune overnight, and decided to become another Discmakers--a one-stop shop for distribution, promotion, duplication, etc. Bad idea. By raising the annual fee to a prohibitive amount that discouraged most musicians from joining, and offering a plethora of services they would not really use, it didn't give us the choice of whether we wanted to use them without in essence "paying for the priviledge to have them offered to us." And in reality, it was very anti-artist. I understand business models need to make money; we all want to profit from our creativity. But raising the price from $9.95 to 49.95 per year--for a one-time digital distribution event -- clearly shifted the priority to the investors, and away from the artist. It was basically a big F-you to the bands. Bait and switch, whatever you call it, it felt crappy and deceptive. Whatever happenend between Jeff and Tunecore, I don't really care, or need to know the details. But something went very wrong and now Tunecore stinks. And I am shopping for alternative digital distributors as we speak.
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