Message from Ditto Music, our online distribution partner

This is from our partners at Ditto Music, one of the top online music distributors in the market. It highlights one of FargoTube’s key strengths: Not only is FargoTube itself fun for fans and profitable for artists — its partnership with Ditto Music helps artists get into wide distribution quickly and easily.

Comparing digital music distributors Ditto Music, CD Baby, Tunecore, and ReverbNation

To sell music online in stores like iTunes, Amazon and Spotify has never been easier. There are several digital distribution companies out there who offer different services for unsigned artists. So we thought we would review the  market and list some feedback to our users.

Which digital music distribution companies are best?

Which distributor gets my music online quickest?

How much is the yearly fee for Tunecore / CDbaby / Ditto Music and Reverb Nation?

And loads more questions, answered here. So lets look at the top four digital distribution companies.

loads more questions, answered here. So lets look at the top four digital distribution companies.

We partner with Ditto Music on projects so have a good grasp of their services. With free barcodes and no percentages taken from sales Ditto Music come in MUCH cheaper than Cd baby or Tunecore or Reverbnation. The yearly subscription fee is $22 which and with more stores and a lower pricing, its better value than Tunecore. You can also distribute your music to iTunes free of charge, so worth testing out just for that.
Ditto were famous for having 11 top 40 singles and provide a host of label services as well as just distribution. These incude chart eligibility, label set up, SMS pre ordering and many more.

At $60 per year Reverbnation are one of the more expensive distributors. They do have a $40 per year option which covers less stores. The site states 40 online stores but when you whittle these down it’s less. iTunes has been counted 5 times and sites like Media net have been split up into individual stores to make it look like a wider reach. We make it around 21 stores in total.
Reverb Nation are good people and have some great social media tools. Its worth checking them out.

CD baby come in cheaper than Tunecore. Their pricing does seem dated though compared to other offerings. Paying a percentage of royalties seems archaic after the demise of physical sales. When sending physical copies to stores to promote, you can understand why stores take a percentage. Online, its harder to justify taking 9% of someone’s earnings, AFTER delivering their online content. CDbaby also charge for barcodes, and it isn’t cheap. It adds another $20 to your album.

Tunecore recently increased their yearly subscription , which prompted a lot of criticism. $50 per year does seem quite steep to hold music on a server. Tunecore’s model was built on not taking a percentage of artists royalties. It feels like $50 a year from each artist could be a massive percentage. If artists  earn $100 from one album, then they will pay out $50 so lose 50% of earnings. Its a lot of money. Tunecore distribute to 19 stores. This doesn’t sound too bad but for some reason they still count iTunes as 7 stores. Distributors only pay once to distribute content to iTunes, its still unclear why they break it up into 7 transactions.

We are happy to say that Ditto Music came in as the best option for digital music distribution.

To set up a free account with Ditto Music , click here

Another thousand for FargoTube!

Exciting news, folks! FargoTube surpassed the 2,000-subscriber mark earlier today. It took only about 5 months for the second thousand to come in, compared to about 12 months for the first thousand.

FargoTube reached 1,000 subscribers in about 12 months, and 2,000 subscribers just 5 months later

The faster growth has come from several important partners, including Ditto Music, a premier online meta-distribution service; the tube that Eddie’s Attic set up for its Open Mic Mondays competitions; and country musician Sherrié Austin, who is launching her next album using FargoTube’s crowd-funding capabilities. Thank you to the three of them and all our other partners, and to all the artists who are monetizing their talents through FargoTube!

Welcoming fanBunker

Here’s a bit more about fanBunker.com. We acquired the site earlier this month, partly for its synergies with FargoTube. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

fanBunker Screenshot

FanBunker facilitates interaction among sports fans, centered both on outside links to sports news and on independent, team-specific blogs.

We’re also bringing on former NFL Linebacker Carlton Bailey, a three-time Super Bowl-er to help bring introduce fanBunker to new fans.

Carlton and the acquisition are part of our continuing push to broaden FargoTube’s appeal to entertainment forms outside of independent music, which has been its strongest market. As you probably know, our social networks are designed to draw users with both exclusive and non-exclusive content, to present that content in an attractive manner, and to make that content a touchstone for fan interaction.

“Our decision as a company to acquire a sports website was a no-brainer,” F3 President of Media and Marketing Kwan Straughn told me. “Since 2008, integrated sports/social entertainment has grown from a modest niche market to a multi-billion-dollar industry.”

F3 Technologies CEO Frank Connor (second from left) and fanBunker co-founder Seth Roseman shake on the deal. From left to right: F3 VP Baron Agee, Connor, Roseman, fanBunker co-founder Mark Griffith, Straughn and F3 Senior VP Stephanie Miller.

Kwan helped to drive our acquisition of fanBunker. We’re hoping to acquire one, two or three additional fan-centric websites by the end of the year. As was true with fanBunker, we’re assessing them for their potential synergies with FargoTube, including the increased visitor traffic we expect them to bring. We’ll definitely keep you abreast of all new happenings on that front.

You can read more about Carlton Bail and fanBunker in the press release we put out this morning.

New look and features coming to FargoTube

Details in this press release. We’ll let you know as soon as it’s ready for viewing and again when it goes live.

We’ll also put out details of the FanBunker acquisition in the next couple of days.

Jump-started!

Sherrié Austin has raised more than $3,000 for her forthcoming album, “Circus Girl,” through FargoTube’s Jump Start crowd-funding tool.

Austin launched the fundraiser in mid-June, with the goal of raising $15,000. Crowd-funding is useful for unsigned artists because it’s an alternative to the traditional label-centric model, in which a record label funds an album’s production, keeps most of the sales proceeds, and often owns the rights to the music in perpetuity.

Beyond that, the combination of Jump Start and FargoTube allows Austin’s fans to participate in the production and release of her music and in other aspects of her career. Austin’s Jump Start campaign allows them to contribute at varying levels, from $5 to $2,000. Fans who contribute that amount can spend a day in Nashville with Sherrié as their tour-guide, a brand-new autographed guitar, a Skyped living room concert premiering songs from “Circus Girl,” an autographed t-shirt, a mention in the CD’s liner notes, and a range of other schwag.

From last week’s conference

FargoTube is reaping the benefits of the Southeast Urban Music Conference, which came together last week in Atlanta. B-Rock and Kwan are in the process of bringing a dozen artists on board, and Frank is creating personalized tubes for several of them. One is Atlanta rapper Jemiah Jai, shown below with Kwan. Another is Gina Hadley, an SUMC featured performer from Miami whose rock-n-soul style draws from R&B, reggae, calypso, salsa, rock, country, and jazz.

Kwan and Jemiah Jai

We’ll probably get others beyond those additional ten or 12. About 50 people came to B-Rock’s and Kwan’s panel — mostly musicians, along with several producers and independent-label executives. One of the people they met was a distributor who may end up getting independent films onto FargoTube.

Separately, B-Rock told me he and Kwan have been talking with a comedian who has appeared on Black Entertainment Television. We’ll definitely let you know if we get him onto FargoTube.

Last but not least, B-Rock and Kwan have been getting really positive feedback on the new logos and branding that we plan to introduce for FargoTube in the next few months. That’s likely to create a lot of additional buzz that will bring even more artists onto the platform. Right now, we’re at 1,716 and counting!

Rolling downtown

I’m heading downtown for the afternoon for a couple of panels and networking events — and hopefully a performance or two — at the Southeast Urban Music Conference (It’s actually in Midtown for those of you know Atlanta). B-Rock’s panel starts at 4 p.m., as we noted in the press release this morning.

I plan to upload a few pictures late tonight or tomorrow morning. In the meantime, here’s B-Rock speaking for a couple of minutes about the conference and his plans for meeting up with Shanti Das and other people who have worked with him in hip-hop.

Spoken words from F3’s spoken-word artist

We’ve all been extremely busy since May 20, when Kwan Straughn and Baron “B-Rock” Agee came aboard to expand FargoTube’s presence on the urban music scene. In this video that I recorded Thursday, B-Rock and I discuss how they’re approaching that opportunity, and what FargoTube means both for independents and for superstars in urban music.

Disclaimer: B-Rock mentions the pop musician Katy Perry only as an example of an “A-list” artist. Perry and F3 Technologies are not collaborating.

Introducing F3’s newest online solution — Website Tournament!

We hope you’ll take a few minutes to check out Website Tournament, our new online solution that brings together talented website designers and potential customers in an open, transparent market designed to deliver optimal results to both.

A business or other customer seeking design services posts a description of the site to be designed, its purpose, and a target prize amount. Designers who have registered on the site – free of charge – create and submit mock-ups. The customer chooses the winning design and pays the designer. Our revenue comes from a percentage of the customer’s prize award.

As an added benefit for both F3 and Website Tournament customers, we can follow-up the design service by hosting and managing the websites for a low monthly fee of just $149.99, including a number of monthly updates. It’s a value-added service comparable to those we’ve introduced for FargoTube and Interaction Community Systems since late last year. Another value add is that customers can opt to load completed website designs onto F3’s proprietary Ascend website content management system for a low monthly fee of $39.95.

Our CEO Frank Connor developed Website Tournament designed and developed Website Tournament after seeing how difficult it is for a small business to purchase high-quality custom website design services at affordable prices.

Several dozen page designers from at least 12 countries have already registered on Website Tournament. The platform ranks designers according to customer satisfaction, the number and type of trophies a designer has earned and other measures of feedback.

Designs not chosen remain the property of the respective designers. We can work with designers to find alternative paths to monetize those designs, for example by promoting select designs as templates in a new website theme store.

Welcoming Kwan and B-Rock

Kwan Straughn (left) and Baron "B-Rock" Agee

Friday was a fun and exciting day at the F3 office. We welcomed Baron “B-Rock” Agee and Kwan Straughn to the F3 team. They’ll be leading FargoTube’s expansion in urban music — particularly here in Atlanta, whose hip-hop scene has come to rival New York’s and L.A.’s in the last few years. Kwan and B-Rock are based here.

B-Rock was part of the hip-hop act B-Rock and The Bizz that put the single “Mybabydaddy” at the top of the charts in 1997 and the phrase “my baby daddy” into popular lingo. But his and Kwan’s experience in the music business goes far beyond that, as detailed in our press release on Friday. They’ll be introducing FargoTube to the hundreds of other musicians, producers and managers they’ve worked with in their 20-plus-year careers.

As you probably know, FargoTube has artists in all genres, with an especially strong concentration of country musicians. So I’m thinking about setting up sort of a friendly in-house competition: By this time next year, will FargoTube more country musicians? or more hip-hop musicians?