It’s been months since the TuneCore Board abruptly and unexpectedly fired Jeff Price. But the cofounder, former CEO and all-around identity of this company has now agreed to disclose considerable detail about his departure to Digital Music News. This is our exclusive interview with Jeff in Los Angeles.
Digital Music News: On stage recently at Digital Music Forum West, you mentioned that you were extremely unhappy with the current situation at TuneCore. What’s going on? What’s the problem?
Jeff Price: I have absolutely no idea. That’s why I have no faith in its ability to succeed. I don’t know who the CEO is. I don’t think there is one. I don’t know if there’s an interim CEO, or if there is, no one’s communicated it to anybody. From what I understand, it seems that a banker with zero experience in the music industry, with no understanding of the nuances of the sector, is running the company.
What’s the vision? Where is it going? Where does it want to go? I mean, a company needs a vision. What is it?
Digital Music News: So, are you describing a company that is getting run into the ground?
Jeff Price: That’s my concern. I mean, I’m literally at the point where I believe the company is going to be run off a cliff. I don’t understand it. It is staffed with great people, the COO, the CTO, the controller, the artist support staff, the finance team, the President of Publishing Administration, the head of Product Development, everyone’s great. The whole thing’s been setup, it just needs a leader.
…the story up until now
Digital Music News: So explain to me, why did you get pushed?
Jeff Price: I wish I could provide a simple clear explanation, I can’t. It’s getting close to half a year since [cofounder] Peter Wells and I were pushed out and still no real reason has been provided. As far as the three original founders, advisors and investors know, there is no new CEO, no interim CEO, no plan, no vision, no leadership and no innate understanding of the music industry or the needs of artists at the top of the company.
From what we can tell, a venture capital banker with no true, solid experience in the music industry, no experience in digital distribution, copyright, licensing, digital music services or the overall emerging digital music market place is running the company. He has few or no connections or relationships with anyone in the industry and can’t speak to and understand artists.
Digital Music News: There’s the emotional tug of being the company’s cofounder. But there’s the very real string of being an investor. How much do you own?
Jeff Price: I own 13% of TuneCore. Peter invested the money left to him by his father to help get it launched. The original founders and team invested a lot in both money and sweat. We have a lot at stake and a lot of reasons to want it to succeed.
That said, due to a confidentiality agreement that TuneCore wants enforced, I can only say limited things. Also, as an ex-officer and director I also have certain restrictions imposed on me by the legal system that prevent me from speaking my mind.
But here’s what I can say, and I thought it might help if I provide some context:
In the middle of 2008, I met with Gill Cogan. According to the Opus Captial website, Gill is the founder and a General Partner at Opus Capital. He convinced me to allow Opus to invest $7 million into TuneCore in return for owning a percentage of our company. We issued a press release around the investment.
Move forward four years to 2012. According to the Opus and TuneCore websites, Gill is still an active sitting board member and General Partner of Opus and, since the investment, is a board member of TuneCore. At the beginning of 2012, there were certain things that occurred internally at TuneCore that I didn’t expect or authorize. It was these actions that, in my opinion, severely jeopardized TuneCore’s existence.
“I can’t comment further as to the specifics but I can say a number of months later I was terminated ‘without cause’ by Gill on behalf of the board.”
No specific reason was provided. Last week, almost four months after being fired, TuneCore’s lawyers implied that if I sued, they would respond by making absurd and Kafkaesque claims about me.
I can’t believe things have gotten this stupid.
…ugly, uglier, ugliest.
Digital Music News: So you’re inside the building one day, abruptly ‘on the street’ the next. What next?
Jeff Price: After I left, I really wanted to make sure TuneCore didn’t go down. I put together a very detailed 12 page letter containing a list of specific things I thought TuneCore should address and follow – a sort of blueprint – and delivered it to the board.
I then got thrown off the board of directors of TuneCore.
I was then offered a “separation and general release agreement” that offered me cash if I agreed to give up:
– all my voting rights as a shareholder,
– all involvement with the company
– the right to sue TuneCore both as an employee and shareholder.
There is no way I can do that.
Then, they came back to me with a new offer; according to my lawyer, they would pay me $125,000 to buy back my 13% equity position. This means they were valuing TuneCore at less than $1 million. The reason for the low value and offer as told to my lawyer is because it is now “personal”.
“Great. Now instead of doing what’s best for the company it appeared to me that this was about a grudge.”
And it gets worse. On September 22nd, this year, I was set to give a keynote presentation at the NY IMSTA conference. On September 17th, I got a ridiculous letter from TuneCore’s lawyer warning me about speaking; apparently they read something on the internet about the keynote and sent a letter to tell me they would be “closely monitoring” me.
You’ve got to be kidding me. There is no one on this planet that cares more about TuneCore than I and they’re worried I’m going to hurt it? This was getting insane.
While all this had been going on, I had been working on finding a buyer for TuneCore. I figured I could get Opus a healthy return on its investment, get the Common share stockholders and exit and get the company back on track. Two companies were interested. Both circled back to me stating TuneCore was non-responsive. Now this I really don’t get. How in the world can they turn down an option they don’t even have? I mean at least get the offer in first. If things were really so horrible that they needed to kick out the CEO, then they should have been thrilled to get the opportunity to sell the company and make a return.
Despite those two possibilities apparently getting shot down, last week, I was able to play a role in delivering one more opportunity that would have really helped artists, provided a service that was needed and made the company a lot of money.
I was informed by the outside entity that one of the conditions of a deal required me to be involved. I was worried about the tension but figured we were all seasoned professionals and with the right opportunity, we could all line up and work together. Unfortunately, I was told by my lawyer that TuneCore’s lawyer stated there were pre-conditions set by Gill that must be met: I would not be allowed to work out of the TuneCore office, I could not have any operational role, no one was allowed to report to me or work for me, I could not have any signing power, I could not be the voice or face of TuneCore, I could not appear on panels or do press interviews on behalf of TuneCore. In addition, they demanded I change my Twitter handle from “@TuneCoreJeff” to something else as my current name may imply I was still involved with the company.
“As of this interview it seems like these pre-conditions most likely killed the deal.”
This is really coming across as if it’s personal. And that’s what concerns me the most. This focus and goal should be around what’s best for TuneCore.
…a post-Price Tunecore.
DMN: What about the artists, is there an attachment to Jeff Price? You are the charisma of TuneCore, or were the charisma of TuneCore.
Jeff Price: I don’t know. I received a lot of emails directly from people. I saw a Hypebot survey, which asked if people would stay or not. TuneCore is nothing without the artists. Now, the only reason I had a voice is because the artists gave me one. If I didn’t have the customer base at TuneCore and I ranted on stage, it wouldn’t have mattered.
The company was always supposed to be the voice of the artist. You’ve undoubtedly read about Tim Westergren and Pandora discussing royalty rates.
“Well, you’ve got Westergren, you’ve got the CRB, you’ve got labels, you’ve got the publishers, where’s the fucking artist’s place in that conversation? That’s what was supposed to be happening.”
I believe the best model for artists is one of service with transparency and accountability. I think the best music business
model for a venture capital organization to invest in is a company built to
serve, not exploit, the artist. That’s
what I was trying to create with TuneCore.
It wasn’t that I was sacrificing a great possible financial exit for
moral reasons; it just so happens the moral reasons and the philosophy
coincide with a great freaking business model.
People that aren’t in the music industry can’t understand the nuances of
why that is. It’s very frustrating. I’m frustrated.
DMN: Is Jeff Price irreplaceable?
Jeff Price: Someone
needs to tell me how that company is worth more now with me gone than with me
there, because I don’t see it. No one
should be irreplaceable, but couldn’t there have been another way to have done
it, or a transition or something? Was
this the best way? How is the company
worth more today than it was when I was still there? Cause I don’t understand it.
…’there’s a method to my madness’
DMN: My next question revolves personality. You’re certainly one of the most controversial executive in this industry. You wear no boxing gloves, and you take people to the mat. Did that work against you and lead to this result?
Jeff Price: I don’t know the motivations behind the decisions of the Board of Directors to terminate me. I can only speak from a business perspective. Tunecore became the largest digital distribution entity in the world with 4 or 5 percent marketshare of all digital music sales, the leader in its space, it’s competition was gone, we’re launching a global publishing music initiative, you know…
So, I don’t know the answer to that question in regards to the way I do things. It’s kind of funny. There’s always a method to the madness. There’s a strategy behind what I do. I never wanted it to be about me. I wanted it to be about TuneCore because if you can pick up media on your company, it’s free advertising. It helps you to acquire customers, but it also pushes forward the agenda.
“The things I say and how I say them and when I say them aren’t done because I like to fight with people. They’re done because I’m trying to to run a successful business and accomplish goals.”
This is a tough fucking business. I mean, it’s been operating for what? Over a 100 years and some punk, snot-nosed like me shows up six years ago and wants to change the whole industry. I have to be loud. I have to be really loud to get above the static level. The first thing I have to do is become educated. The devil is always in the details, understanding copyright laws, money flow, contracts, how the whole system works, and technology.
As one example, I’m in World War III with some entrenched old school people on the PHO list by stating IRC codes are not required for digital distribution. People think I killed their firstborn child. When I say you don’t need an IRC code for distribution you actually don’t. You don’t need it. I may as well killed someone, but the truth is that’s the truth. And getting to the truth is important as you need the information in order to understand how to change things or accomplish goals. Getting to the very grain or level detail of things you have a deep understanding. You have to have a deep understanding. It’s only when you understand the way the whole thing is built from the bottom to the top you then figure out how to change it. Then, once you understand how the whole thing operates, the whole Rube Goldberg mechanism, if you’re familiar with Rube Goldberg.
DMN: Of course.
Price: How the whole thing works, then it’s like, ‘Okay, now I have to have the voice to get heard’ because the only voice that exists is the RIAA on Capitol Hill and they are representing their constituents, which is funny, but there is no voice for this whole industry. How do I get the attention?
Alright, you take the facts, then I have a moral opinion and a philosophy, there’s right and there’s wrong, okay, I can build on the facts. You confront someone over something that they’ve done that’s wrong. You just hammer on the point. It’s not too difficult, and I get surprised that people tell me I’m so controversial or I’m so bombastic and cantankerous.
“I’m like, what is so cantankerous or bombastic about approaching someone and saying you didn’t pay this person all their money? You needed the license and you didn’t pay them. And when that other entity is a multinational, multi-billion dollar organization that gives me the middle finger, what am I supposed to do then?”
I have two choices: you go cower over in the corner and say ‘Okay, well, I’m building a company. I want to enact change.’ But I’m lucky, I have access to media. I’ll scream and see if that can help move the needle.
…on his fight with Grooveshark.
Price: It worked with Grooveshark. It did, it actually worked. It worked with some other —
DMN: In the sense that the NMPA —
Price: No, Grooveshark actually ended up contacting TuneCore. I guess I’m not allowed to disclose what ultimately went down.
DMN: Oh, so this is over the mechanical licensing issue.
Jeff Price: It was the whole PHO list thing that you read.
DMN: Okay, so this is really interesting. They reached out to you, got the list of artists.
Price: From there, I guess I can’t comment on it anymore because I guess it’s confidential. I’m not allowed to comment, but I’ll just say it ended up in an end result which I was hoping for without having to hire [litigators].
DMN: So you were happy with the way Grooveshark behaved?
Price: Well, I was happier than I was, it went in the right direction in my opinion. So there’s a method to the
madness.
…on his fights with Digital Music News.
Price: When you wrote your article [ref: ‘99% of TuneCore Artists Make Less Than Minimum Wage‘],
I’ll be candid, you wrote your article I was pissed off because I don’t
like the way you phrase things sometimes because… not because it’s true or
false, but because I think it provided a perception that TuneCore… to suggest
it was disenchanting us or trying to rip people off.
That’s not what we’re trying to do, but
that might have been the unintended consequence, and that frustrated the hell
out of me. That thing I wrote on
Thanksgiving in response to what you had written… probably should have gone
through another couple drafts on it.
DMN: [Laughs] It was great.
Price: It was like 10 drafts to get that thing written, and it was still 300 pages long, but there’s a reason. You can’t lose if you’re on the side of the artist. If you’re honestly on the side of the artist and you mean it and your voice is simply… it lets them keep the rights to their music and keep their money, provide transparency and get their voice heard. You gave me something to respond to to get the artist voice heard.
…on his fight with Tommy Silverman.
Price: Tommy Silverman, I might disagree with some of the things he said but, God bless him because when he opened his mouth to Wired and he made the stupid statement about how all that music from TuneCore is cluttering the space, stopping the good music from selling and 80% of it is crap, I couldn’t have asked for a better entre. It allowed me to be able to respond and get heard and defend the artist. Because, number one, it’s a stupid statement. Number two, ‘Oh, great, now I have a position to be heard to defend the artist simultaneously, bring up the brand of the company.’ Then with more artists, I’m able actually to have a legal base, all that through copyright, so we’re administered to go force entities that aren’t doing the right thing to do the right thing. That’s the right business model.
Tunecore: profiting from artists’ hopes and dreams?
DMN: There’s a very dark accusation that DIY companies are merely dangling hopes and dreams in front of artists’ eyes, when the reality is almost none of them will experience success. Yet the end result is a profit for these companies because
there’s a price of admission no matter what.
Price: I agree with you. It’s frustrating to me and that’s why I started TuneCore. Those companies are what inspired me to start TuneCore. If you went to the [TuneCore] homepage, you’ll notice — at least when I was there — it was a very utilitarian message. Music on iTunes, keep your copyrights.
DMN: You basically saw that problem. That was a pretty basic thing.
Price: I didn’t promise snake oil and it really frustrated with me when people said, ‘Well, you’re taking advantage of the artist because you’re telling them they’re going to succeed.’ That’s just not the case. Artists had one choice before to get onto iTunes – give up rights and money, at least now they have another choice.
“There’s nothing within TuneCore that says you’re going to succeed or fail. It says what it does. It doesn’t promise you the possibility of something. It says it’s going to do something and does that thing specifically.”
Artists have their own hopes and dreams. Nobody wants to think they suck, but you’ll notice all the videos that I’ve done, everything I’ve written, it’s all about understanding the mechanisms of how this works and have the information to determine if this is what you want to do and if so, how to get there.
“I can’t tell you how many times I put in writing publicly most artists aren’t going to make it.”
DIY optimism. deflated. crushed.
DMN: There’s almost a depressing pall that’s set over the space since Tunecore arrived back in 2006.
Price: Right, 2006.
DMN: At that moment, six years ago, there was this idea — fueled by Long Tail, fueled by a lot of things — that this was a completely disintermediated environment. And finally the artist could reach his or her or their audience in an environment no longer controlled by major labels. The euphoria that resulted from that was just enormous. Now that’s flattened.
Price: Well, two things in response to that, but first, I didn’t even think about it like that at the time. The reason I started TuneCore is because my label spinART had been approached by IODA and The Orchard. This was a long time ago.
This must have been 2004, for God’s sake, almost 10 years ago. So I want to be clear that, ten years ago, they wanted to do spinART Records’ digital distribution. But the fee they wanted to charge was they wanted to control the rights for a term of three years, five years, and they wanted to take 15% to 30% of the revenue off the exploitation master recordings. And my response to them was, ‘Why? What are you doing?’
‘Oh, we’re going to market and promote you.’
But you can’t market and promote me because you represent 10,000 labels and it doesn’t scale. Besides, I’m doing all the co-op buying and tour support and mailing shit off to radio. So how do you justify the backend? The point was they couldn’t.
It upset me. I thought it was wrong. You’ll find at that time that if I was screaming, yelling, no one would have listened to me. I didn’t have the weight of the artists behind me. I saw something that was wrong and I wanted to fix it. I didn’t think about if every artist is going to succeed or fail; I thought there’s a wrong in the world and I want to right it. This shouldn’t be. There should be an easy way to put music onto Apple’s hard drive and not have to transfer copyrights and give up revenue. I just thought the old model was wrong.
If you’re going to take back in revenue, earn it. It was simply, ‘This is wrong; let’s provide something that to me is right.’ The impact was incredible. Many artists made so much freaking money. I mean, literally you had over a 1,000 artists every month getting, at least, $1,000 bucks. I know that that sounds like peanuts to some, but I go back to my days of running spinART Records. I mean, I would have been thrilled to send royalty checks of a $1,000 a month to our bands. They would have loved it. No band gets $1,000 a month in the old system. No one ever recoups their advance, let alone get $1,000 in band royalties a month. Sure there’s a lot more than a thousand artists and a lot more making a lot less but, Jesus, that was an improvement. I took great pride in that.
It was very frustrating for me see people point to that as a reason something wasn’t working because in my mind, are you kidding me? This didn’t even exist. Now these people are getting money when they were getting nothing before.
Who the hell knows where it’s going to go from here? Maybe next month they’ll take off, maybe next year they’ll take off, maybe they’ll never take off but, Jesus, at least let them in the game. It’s funny. You know the movie Rashomon, the Japanese movie where you see the same story from different perspectives. To me it was like, ‘Wow, the glass is half full.’ For some it was, ‘Wow, the glass is half empty.’
“I would scratch my head. ‘How can you say it’s half empty. Before it was completely empty, now it’s halfway full’. At least that’s the way I look at it.”
…on his fight with David Lowery.
DMN: Critics like David Lowery would argue that the well-being of artists is far worse now than it’s ever been.
Jeff Price: Honestly, I don’t get it. I read the same things you read. I wrote a blog response to that, which is I agree with David that artists should be compensated for the use of their works. I don’t understand some of the things he said. They’re just contrary to empirical facts…
[quoting Lowery]
“Most artists made money on the road…”
No, they didn’t, most artists made no money on the road.
“Most artists made their money off the sales of their recorded music…”
No, they didn’t, they never recouped their advance.
“Most artists got paid their mechanical royalties…”
Well, there were multiple songwriters, the money had to be split between them, it was a three-quarter split with a 10-song cap that was reported by the label, that was the middleman between them, and the entities of that owed them the money. You never knew if the royalty accounting was accurate anyway.
“Oh, most artists made money off of the advance…”
No, they didn’t, they took the advance, they recorded, what was left over they split it between the four band members after paying their lawyer and the manager and, maybe, ended up with $5,000 in their pockets.
My problem with David in that one article he wrote wasn’t that I didn’t agree with his position, I agree with it. My concern was he stated things that were empirically false, giving his detractors a sideshow to argue about which would ultimately undermine his own argument. We should be sticking to the point, which is in the music industry artists should be fairly compensated for the use of their recordings and composition. He stated things that were just empirically false. It made his whole argument look weak. It was a diversion. That was my problem with what David wrote, which is, ‘Jesus, if you’re gonna go down this path, fight with the truth because if you don’t you’re going to get your ass handed to you.’ He got discredited because he said some things that weren’t accurate.
…what happens next.
DMN: What’s next? I view this as being a big setback for you.
Jeff Price: I do too, for the industry.
The setback isn’t about me, it’s about what I perceive as the declining influence of TuneCore. If there were somebody else within the organization that was a visionary, that was leading it, taking it somewhere, okay. It is what it is and I’d be frustrated by it would make sense. But right now there is no one.
You look at the landscape over the last couple of months, IODA, The Orchard, INgrooves consolidations, competitors to TuneCorp falling off the wayside. The TuneCore creation of the global publishing and administration pipeline, which never existed before, for potentially millions of songwriters globally, direct licensing deals with digital music services that otherwise were infringing on copyright, getting people back more money, more quickly with transparency, the leadership position in the market of revenue generation, the growth representing 5% of all digital music sales.
Fucking EMI’’ is at 7.5%. TuneCore did it in three-and-a-half years. It took EMI a 100 years and what, $20 billion to get that market share?
Now, I look at the marketplace and all I see are… not meant disrespectfully, but companies not of the same caliber as TuneCore. It has very little competition in a rapidly shifting environment that is moving completely to streaming. It could solve a global problem for artists and the digital music services. At the moment, TuneCore has no voice.
DMN: What do you do next?
Jeff Price: So far, this change has led to incredible opportunities for me. Change sometimes forces a person to take on new challenges and to work on new and better creations. I have been approached by so many name brand companies it is amazing. The people in the know in the industry obviously have a different opinion of me than does the TuneCore Board.
Right now I’m consulting for SOCAN. I found that really interesting. Number one, as you can imagine I want to get more educated in that sector. The more educated I am, the more intelligently I can speak about it, then the more I can argue or use the strategy to enact change.
Number two, I would like to find a path to re-involving myself with TuneCore. I suspect that will be a challenging path based on my understanding of some of the things that have occurred, but that’s my goal. I want to make sure that door remains open until it seems like there’s no reason to keep it open. To that end, I want to apply my skills and my knowledge towards continuing the vision, because the pieces necessary to change the industry currently exists out in the marketplace right now.
You can literally couple them together. Take TuneSat, a TuneCore, a SOCAN, a CD Baby, whatever it might be, I mean, literally you could put together the pieces of a new music industry right now. With TuneCore I was trying to build it all up myself from the ground up, get the market share, and customer base. But instead of building it up, maybe cobble together other entities to achieve it.
DMN: Why not create another TuneCore?
Jeff Price: TuneCore already exists. I think an easier path would be to re-engage with the company. If there was a way to do that that made sense to everyone involved, I would do it. Why reinvent the wheel when if it’s already there?
DMN: Okay, fair enough. Well, thanks so much for our time.
Jeff Price: Your welcome.
DMN: That was quite enlightening.
Jeff Price: I don’t even feel I revealed that much.
DMN: Well, no, I’m happy you revealed what you could. I think I can connect a lot of the dots, so can my readers.
+1
+1, lol
+1,000
Wow, just wow. Jeff seems so confused and out of touch it’s no wonder they let him go. This is a guy that doesn’t even understand how Soundscan works, so I’m not surprised by this turn of events.
Jeff never understood that TuneCore is a glass ceiling business aimed at hobbiests – and as more and more of them don’t recoup the money they pay to TuneCore to keep their bedroom demos active, that reduces the revenue base.
All you can do at that point is try to upsell people into more services that are staying, and/or drop the cost of the service to be more affordable.
For all of Jeff’s talk about “Artists Rights” the musicians he most frequently speaks and acts against are the interests of actual Proffessional Musicians.
It’s ok to build a business around hobbyists, but just admit it… brings me to my last thought… Jeff was such a cheerleader for a the company he was their greatest asset because he fundementally beleived a lie… how ironic.
Lots of major industry artist hating trolls on here. No one real buys it…
TC got 5% of market share, EMI at 7.5%. That’s impressive and shows a popular artist base. Who exactly is a “hobbyist” and who is an “artist” to you? Independents are hobbyists because even though they make more than artists who might be more popular and have signed their rights away, they don’t have the majors’ hands in their pockets – and that makes them unprofessional? Get a life.
Smug industry assholes make me sick. Your days are numbered and you know it, all you can do is fire your fake credibility around to try and put others down. Scum.
@ Nope… uh dude… you need to study like some math…
what % of that 5% if from legacy bands from the label system releasing new albums, like Trent Reznor and NIN and how much of that is actual bedroom musicians?
but don’t take my word for it, here’s a break down using Jeff’s own stats from TC:
http://www.gearslutz.com/board/music-business-archive-now-closed-posting/491725-tunecore-stats.html
BOTTOM LINE:
” a average title gross of $277 dollars per year. for all but the top 14 Artists”
yeah… way better… LOL…
I know I know… math sucks.
uh dude, you need to like figure out how to make your own posts instead of copying and pasting the wrong info from an incorrect gearslutz forum post.
i’ve seen the numbers in spreadsheet form when they were released from TC not too long ago. There are hundreds if not thousands of artists on there making $1000+ off their releases, more than enough to be taken seriously and more than enough to easily recoup the distro costs.
and, the point remains, why should someone have to give up all their rights when access can be granted at low cost?
your argument is bad and you should feel bad.
@ nope
sorry dude… the facts don’t change just cause you want them to, there’s a saying… denial is not just a river in egypt.
the gearslutz posts link back to jeff’s own numbers at tunecore…FAIL
It’s surprising — and sad — that Mr. Price needs to slam the door like this.
I really thought he wanted to do good things to the industry. And now it seems he just wants to hurt as many people as possible.
If I were him, I’d move on.
Uh, please dude quit drinking and partying before you try to write – it shows!
Haha. Major labels have always been in the business of “merely dangling hopes and dreams in front of artists’ eyes, when the reality is almost none of them will experience success.” Very dark accusation indeed.
So, uhm which major did you say will be picking up Tunecore?
Listeing to Suite: Judy Blue Eyes on vinyl
Whether you disagree with Mr. Price or not, one has to wonder if there aren’t major monied interests invested in Mr. Price’s exit and the described lack of “vision” at Tunecore currently.
Could larger companies desire and actually be seeking the demise of DIY’ers like Tunecore in order to reclaim (read: Control) the music release “funnel” once again.
This sort of behavior certainly isn’t new to the business world. See: Hearst’s push against hemp fiber paper to protect his timber-origin paper. Oil companies’ frequent push back against alternative energies that could harm fossil fuel demand. On and on.
The music industry is arguably one of the most cutthroat in the world, so is this really beyond the scope of reality?
Intriguing for sure. My 2 cents.
Put your conspiracy theories to rest. Tunecore was losing money. It’s as simple as that.
I don’t think it was losing money at all …
If you aren’t signed to a major, you aren’t a real musician. Period.
I’m sure your manager and lawyer assured of this right before you signed your deal….
That’s a totally and completely asinine statement… spoken by someone who is completely out of touch or just landed here in their DeLorean from 1986.
There are many great artists signed to indies or self publishing – seriously, where do you get off with that kind of statement?
I know artists that are extremely successful and ones that are just getting started, and the quality of their music and devotion to craft make them real artists.
Of course, without proper marketing and distro, there’s no ability to connect to the market – and though a major can help that happen, it’s not the only way.
On behalf of the Pho list and its many diverse voices, none of them “entrenched old school,” I’m here to refute Price’s claim about WWIII with us insisting ISRC codes (he called them IRC codes) are required for digital music distribution.
Apple’s iTunes requires ISRC codes, clearly and unambiguously: http://bit.ly/jmGnZ3 — read it yourself and decide if he’s correct. Nielsen requires them too, as do others; Those that do not require them desire them.
While we’re asking questions about Price and ISRC codes, add these:
1. Why did Price simply make up his own codes that look like ISRC codes?
2. When he made his up, he used TC as a prefix, assigned by the International Standards Organization (ISO) to Turks & Caicos. Why take the code belonging to another country?
3. Why did Price formulate his own codes in the form of ISRC codes if he wasn’t emulating them and didn’t think they were required?
4. As with ISWC for songs, and ISNI for artists, without a unique global identifier, how will we track sound recordings? Jeff claims he agrees, but offers no solution other than his examples of either ignoring them or making them up.
5. How will countries with different languages and entirely different character sets (China, Russia, etc) identify artist, song title, album name in an acceptable way? How can we identify theirs without a unique ID? Brazil requires ISRC for sound recordings for these reasons and others.
6. Price says he’s consulting SOCAN on these issues. Has he read SOCAN’s CEO’s solid support and position on the need for ISRC and other key identifiers? Here it is, from July of this year:
http://www.socan.ca/
This list of questions could go on, but these are enough. We aren’t the only people asking these questions — search using his name and ISRC.
No one pretends ISRC is required everywhere. We realize the current system relies too much on artist name, song name, album title, etc. It is one of the key reasons music money fails to reach its proper recipient. It was once good enough, but it no longer suits a global digital economy.
ISRC codes should be improved, especially with the database and verification system now in progress, but they have decades of use, certification by the International Standards Organization (ISO), many distributors offer them free, and ISO limits the revenue from them to cost recovery only. There are ISRC agencies in more than 40 countries and growing.
There are now more than 50 million ISRC codes evolved over more than twenty years. We aren’t going back. No one on Pho thinks artist name, song title and album title isn’t the past and an unfortunate remnant in our present system, but neither do we think the digital music present and the global future unfolding can work without ISRC as a unique global ID for sound recordings.
Great points! Very well stated with thought-provoking questions.
Cheers.
Why are you so INFORMED about ISRC codes. Do you work for some ISRC company or something? You just typed up this whole article in the comments sectionin defending ISRC codes hahaha.
While I understand the need for ISRC codes, they are STILL just another MIDDLEMAN wanting money and standing in between the artist and the stores
“…it’s competition was gone…”
Haha, good one Jeff.
Sincerely,
Your friends at CD Baby
I don’t hate CD Baby and appreciate any company that offers services to the benefit DIY artists, large or small. I love the competition in the market here as it allows companies and artists to pick what’s best to suit them. However, Jeff is partially correct here. While the competition wasn’t “gone”, as he stated, Tunecore did differentiate itself from other DIY distributor’s.
I’ll state openly that I have a bias towards Tunecore. That being said, there are two primary reasons I believe CD Baby will never attain Tunecore’s “status”, even if/when it attains Tunecore’s numbers.
Firstly, Branding. The name “CD Baby” conjures an image that is not consistent with the statement, “I’m a professional artist.”
Second, CD Baby takes percentages of song/album sales. This is a boon to artists that make high-value, high-selling music, driving them to companies like Tunecore, where it’s one fee per year and done, whether they sell 100 copies or 100,000.
In short, while a generalisation, it’s fairly safe to say that in the eyes of most industry folks I interact with, “CD Baby is for DIY weekend warriors”, while “Tunecore is for DIY’ers with serious goals”. Both are good and have their purpose, but are for different crowds on the whole.
No disrespect intended. Just what I’ve witnessed over the past several years. Cheers.
There’s no doubt that Tunecore’s business model is different than CD Baby’s. Their 0% model with $50 annual fee is attractive to many artists, and they are a worthy competitor who we respect as one of the few ethical operators in the space.
Our model is different because we take a modest 9% admin fee on digital sales, and since there’s no annual fee we never have to kick our artists off iTunes, Amazon, Spotify, etc. if their credit card expires (or if the annual revenues on their catalog titles drops below $50 per year). That has value for many, many artists.
But we’re so much more than just a digital distributor. We also have the largest all-independent retail store. And we’re the only guys where artists can also sell their CDs (including on Amazon, and through our partnership with Alliance). We also offer widgets for artists’ web site sales, and a Facebook MusicStore app so artists can sell music on their FB pages. Not to mention web hosting at HostBaby. Taken together, these are serious tools for serious DIY artists.
All those services combined have allowed us to accumulate the largest independent song catalog in the world, and we continue to sign up record numbers of artists each year.
As for the name… Well, that’s what it was originally called, and we wear it proudly. Artists know us as CD Baby, so we’ve chosen not to change it. In the future… well, you’ll have to keep watching us.
Tony van Veen
No one gives a fuk about CDBaby dude. Why are you even here? DiscMakers bought out CDBaby from Derek Sivers for $22 million. I’m surprised you aren’t buying out your smaller competitors like ADEDistribution. Hell, you could even buy them out for $10 million and erase the competition.
Pretty sad that you use this article to promote your own business that is about as pathetic as they come. I have to laugh at your “modest 9%”. Wow… that says it all!
ADEDistribution is a scam! Makell Bird is a well known scam artists and he built a scam distribution site that users blogger to trick people into signing up for distribution. If you are serious about your music, you should just stick with CD Baby, TuneCore, RouteNote, or ReverbNation. These guys are true at what they do!
STAY AWAY FROM ADEDISTRIBUTION!!!
And Steven Finch from Routenote is back again. How do we know? No one else has heard of Routenote and Steven uses words like ‘scam’ a lot for SEO 101.
Makell Bird bad-mouths competitors to try and build customers for his one-man show ‘ADE Distributon’. It doesn’t work for him and it doesn’t work for you Steven.
Please check with DigitalMusicNews, because the comment above isnt me and didnt come from our office. Thus, im sure it has a different IP address. RouteNote helps over 14,000 artists and 1,000 more ever month.. really .. No one has heard of us? hmmm
Great read, comments are ever better.
Seen him on so many panels. So sad.
Wow…
“This means they were valuing TuneCore at less than $1 million.”
Yeah… WOW… that is crazy cause in reality TuneCore is making 100,000 a MONTH at least.
I was more impressed that Jeff actually got a $7 million investment for TuneCore. Imagine what a smaller company like ADEDistribution would do with an investment like that!
The thing is, with venture capitalists and investors they EXPECT a return much greater than their investment… so they were probably pissed that they didn’t make $7 million in 1 month like they THOUGHT they were going to do. So, then they take over and want to run it like a bank. Mark my words there is some financial trickery about to play out at TuneCore. They have to recoup $7 million. Don’t be surprised when they HIKE the price up AGAIN or if some royalty statements come back shorter than you expected.
ADEDistribution is a scam! Makell Bird really doesn’t know how to run a business! I recommend everyone trying out RouteNote. Have anyone ever used the service?
http://www.routenote.com
Makell, you were great in Trading Places. You lost your dignity there too.
Sharing more lies + his martyrdom!
I still don’t understand why people are hating on this guy for creating a service that cuts out that ridiculous upfront percentage that DIY artists have to give away to other companies providing similar services. If it is true, and I beilieve it is, that most small bands or artists, especially those just starting out, do most of their own marketing, their own career managing and their own publicity, why would it make sense for them to give a percentage up to another company? Just like Jeff says, they are too big – what are they going to do to market you in the sea of thousands of other arstists? Nothing. That’s something I learned from experience. Maybe Tunecore isn’t going to be the entire industry, in fact we all know this model wouldn’t REPLACE the current model entirely. But for you all to say that this model doesn’t make sense or to knock him for his ideas – you are all short sighted. These ideas and this company not only has a place in the future of the business, they have a place now. And it is important to recognize that he does care to be giving more back to artists, and that should be the first thing everyone looks at. Here’s a guy who wants to cut a lot of the BS out and keep the labels and publishers from taking rights and then taking huge cuts out of the revenue stream for providing absolutely nothing. And instead he wants to offer artists an opportunity to keep their rights and take a much smaller cut for providing… barely more than the nothing that everyone provides, but for WAY CHEAPER. Why is this not a great idea for music and for artists? Well the problem is it isn’t great for that business. If he only takes $50/year from artists how will he keep growing his business… but then again, the point here is that maybe you DON’T just go on growing and growing, you simply provide a service for those who want to partake for a fairer price than the others do. No reason to hate on him for that… And whatever you heard from someone else who “knows” what they are talking about, musicians as a whole made less money years ago, generally never recouped their expenses, and fundamentally not that much has changed – the reality that art is not a guaranteed income situation needs to set in for everyone in this business. You are not owed anything, you are not guaranteed to make good money as an artist, and you are guaranteed to go through a lot of hell to get possibly nothing out of it. If you aren’t ready for that the business isn’t for you anyway.
Interesting interview, for sure, but I’m still chuckling over the transcription that produced “disenchanting us” for “disingenuous.”
Tunecore was kicking ass in digital music distribution and publishing, so the board booted the CEO?
@mfbach
no – and that’s why he’s gone.
Makes me very nervous about Tunecore. They claim they are still the same business and were all safe, but if someone that knows the industry is not running the show, its kind of like an airplane without a pilot. I hate that the legal system prevents people from talking about what is going on, because left hanging in the wind is the artists. If Tunecore wants artists to stay they need to convince us they are operating in our best interests and do is ASAP!
It is amazing just how all of these people who comment appear to be experts and seem to have the only word on the subject. If all of you that post all the hate were as successful as you were, I doubt you would be wasting your time on this post. Instead, you show your vile and ugly inhuman side by spewing the contents of your mouth, rather than your brain.
Jeff, $1,000 a month for a band IS peanuts. Especially when that sort of figure represents the top echelon of earners.
While it’s true the vast majority of TuneCore’s dilettante clientele would have made nothing under the old system, the ~$200 the average TC user makes now (per annum!) is still in “rounding error” territory.
The old, pre-Napster model earned more musicians a liveable wage than an army of TuneCores ever could (which is to say nothing of all the millionaire musicians it minted)
If you want to lower the bar until it clanks against the floor, fine, but don’t you dare call it “progress”.
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.
Please let us know what you find when you find that alternative.
Dear Jeff, leaving TuneCore would be like giving up something you love. Do not forget that Jeff is “the father” of TuneCore. Probably without him, many musicians would still be anonymous …Barry Denicola Realty
Dear Jeff, you are a winner and winners can not give up!
You have to take the contrio in your “soul company”…
When the heads of 3 independent distros are arguing with trolls in the comments section of an interview with a 4th who got fired, I weep for the state of the tools available to independent musicians.
Aside from what the article is about, the comments section says a lot about (to me anyway) the need for Artists to educate themselves in the business side of “The Music Business” as much as crafting quality songs. Promoting, Target Marketing, Manufacturing, Etc..
Tunecore, CDbaby, et al are offering you services in exchange for your dollars, they are businesses trying to earn money. Nothing wrong with that. But the rest is up to you. And not only do they tell you that, they also try to teach you to do better too.
It never ceases to amaze me how little my artist friends are willing to learn about a business they want so desperately to be in and then get upset when they fail. Yet there’s never been a better time for those who are willing to wear both the hat of the Artist and Entrepreneur.
Good Article!
I enjoyed your comments and your position. This is about music and it is about the business of music. If you are good, someone else is always willing to exploit you. Therefore, get off the pot and learn the business and maximize your full exposure and potential.
Alternative … Catapult.
TuneCore, co-founded and run by wild Jeff Price, had a singular vision of doing everything to make life better for musicians.
Although TuneCore San Francisco is one of the largest companies, there are several other companies that provide the exact same type of service at different rates.
well, maybe its time to move on to dooload.com….
mhh….
not nice what is happenin around tunecore, sad story….
Dear Jeff Price, what do you think about Music Piracy? It is one growing phenomenon or not? Does internet influence this fact?
Have you noticed that plots within the horror movie often involve the intrusion of an evil force, event, or personage, commonly of supernatural origin, into the everyday world.
http://tunecoreripoff.blogspot.com/ Never ever use Tunecore.