Maybe I need to get out more but the lack of information or consistency with regards to download vouchers provided with your pricey vinyl records is exasperating…
It’s quite clear if there is a sticker. But there isn’t always – which can mean one of two things – there isn’t one (eg Arcade Fire latest) or there is (The Horrors). For me it’s a key part of deciding to buy the pricey 180g blah colour vinyl thing vs. the £10 cheaper CD or nothing at all – so if it is there, why not tell the consumer. And if it isn’t, why? Are you really hoping the mug who just paid £23 should also pay a further £7 to get it into iTunes?
And don’t rip me off. Eg the new Bowie box..£170, but no download voucher offered. But then bizarrely because I purchased through Amazon today I was told I have an autorip download of the set. So if you buy though Amazon you get one but not elsewhere?
And lastly, shops never know (sans sticker) whether it has one or not, and kind of look at you like it is a strange question.
One constantly reads that the music industry is struggling to keep-up with the changing habits of consumers – with the public switching more & more to streaming rather than buying product etc.
So why not at the very least try and give clear information as to what the product has?
I’ll tell you what grinds my gears , when you download the tracks with your voucher and the track info is so poor that you have to either alter it all yourself manually or burn the thing to disc and re-import it so that you can ask iTunes to find the correct info – I’m looking at you R.E.M. !!
Say what you like about Amazon, but that Autorip feature is how it should be done.
Agreed and why is every single system different – quite often if the broadband breaks down you’re stuffed and have to email for another
Agree with the above. Amazon is on the right lines with its Autorip but king of this feature must be Bandcamp, where you automatically get a download *in your preferred format*.
On a related note. I wish that the physical-copy-free-download thing existed with books. Many is the book I’d like to see on the shelf but would prefer to actually read on Kindle.
Agreed re Bandcamp ones. You get both MP3 and FLAC and it’s always there if you need to download again.
As to books the publishers can’t get into their head that that would be a good sales proposition. The ebook is inferior in that it is only a licence, not owned, so you can’t trade it. Which of course you can with a book. At the very least have a proof of purchase with a book that enables you to download it for, say, £1.
Yes, yes, yes, to Kindle download with book purchase
Happens with a few magazines I subscribe to and works very well. It would be just great if it was done with books too.
I don’t know about part 92, but I’ve got part 1.
Taking until 2017 to release a “Rolling Stones at the BBC” album.
Expensive audiophile half-speed-mastered vinyl which comes with a 128kbps MP3 download code. The Abbey Road half-speed-mastered Back To Black series have this donwload ‘option’.
By contrast, the recent Peter Gabriel half-speed mastered vinyl (not mastered at Abbey Road) comes with a choice of download options, including studio-master 24-bit 96kHz. And the vinyl costs half the price of the Back To Black series.
Excellent point – a few times getting 128k! A case in point here was the Matthew Sweet Kickstarter album – you paid extra for demos/bonus stuff by download – only 128kbps.
Amazon boasts to me that I have about 25 thousand tracks available as “Autorips” from CDs I’ve bought over the years. Why anyone would want a tinny as fuck crappy MP3 when they’ve forked out for the physical artefact eludes me, but there you go.
My vinyl jumps when I play it in the car
So rip a wav copy and burn it onto a CD-R, throw it away or give it away when you’re sated.
I do want a digital file if I buy something – although I realise I could rip the CD. What is annoying though is that both Amazon and iTunes are still only available in 256k files.
A view from the industry side: from time to time I talk to people from record companies (from label owner to producer to promo guy) and whenever I ask about downloads (and the crappy tagging of the tracks) the answer is the same: downloads seem to be a big sales argument, but hardly anyone seems to actually use them! A producer gave me numbers: a recent vinyl album which sold nearly 1000 copies in the first few weeks (so clearly not a niche product) came with a download card. Exactly 12 people (!!) bothered to use the download link (one of them apparently twice…). This didn’t cover even a fraction of the costs of setting up the download site and printing the individual codes.
One company (I think it’s Ace, but I’m not sure) had the same experience and now provide an “E-mail download” for those few who want digital files: you write an E-mail to them, and they send you a dropbox link. Presto! 😉
Interesting point. I suppose given we’re all supposed to be streaming the number of people who want any sort of mp3 is on the wane. In some ways obviously with old records they’re just things I play on vinyl but I’m old school and like a digital file for my portable as well. I’ve no qualms about sourcing a digital version through nefarious means if so required.
Perhaps I should email UMC and ask them to send me the Flac files. Half-speed mastered, obvs.
1,000 copies in two or three weeks, NOT a niche product?
Eh? How the industry has changed!
Without, apparently, any irony, in 1967 the Traffic (not the Beatles or Stones) 45 “Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush” advertised itself with a tag-line akin to “Don’t miss out, first 100,000 copies in a picture sleeve.”
Something’s got to change. Speaking from the “tiny independent artist” viewpoint, our downloaded digital album costs £4.85. We’d have to chalk up 1276 Spotify plays to make up one album download sale. That’s nutty bananas, surely.
We have never had Apple Music or Spotify royalty statements amounting to more than a few quid at a time. YouTube is even worse.
There must surely be a model which allows digital content to pay artists sustainably?
Your posts have been very informative @DisappointmentBob – I have generally used Spotify to sample before I buy, but some of the drivers have been around the fact that I have so much stuff accumulated at home that buying more has become…well…shall we say… a bone of contention…? Us oldies only have so much shelf space.
By the way….your CD on heavy rotation today…and will be on my radio show on Sunday!
Kathryn Williams suggests a patronage button on artists’ pages on Spotify, which I think is a nice idea. I love streaming, I do it myself all the time, but since I worked out the finances I’ve decided that from now on I’m going to buy streamed albums that I play a lot. Otherwise we fans simply won’t get new music any more, except of the most mainstream kind.
And thanks so much for the kind words, Nigel 🙂
@DisappointmentBob – I see your tracks can be streamed via Amazon but you can’t buy the CD there. Is this a permanent situation? I will direct people to your website for now…
Yep: the Bandcamp is the best place for us, although our website works too.
Sadly selling on Amazon would require some paperwork/red tape which isn’t worth our while doing at present.
All our sales were CD, Vinyl and a wee bit from Ian Tunes as Downloads.
We’ve had literally Pennies from streaming.
CDs maybe old hat to a lot of people but they are still handy ways of getting something cheap and cheerful in return for bunging the artist a few quid. I always bung extra remixes on as well.
Love the patronage button idea but suspect Mr Spotify and Ian Tunes wouldn’t be having any of it.
It wouldn’t have to cost them a bean, apart from the minimal effort of putting the button there. It could be set up as direct links to the artists own sites, completely external to the service’s infastructure.
It wouldn’t, but I can’t imagine Apple or Spotify supporting it unless they get a huge % cut.
If approached in the right way (i.e. Apple/Spotify “Saving Music” or “Helping Make Music Pay”) I could see them being quite amenable.
I think if any problems were to be encountered it would be from the big label and publishing groups like Sony & Universal seeing money going past them without being able to take a cut. Especially if any of their own artists put patronage buttons on their pages.
No doubt various governments would want to look at it for squeezing a bit of tax revenue as well.
There is something of a generation thing going on here.
Those of us who are a little older understand that if musicians do not make any money they cannot support themselves. Older punters, like myself, will hopefully buy a CD or a T shirt at the merch table. We like the band and it will boost their income.
Younger punters, used to getting everything for free on Spotify or the Tube, are not os likely to understand this.
If musicians, artists, journalists etc don’t get paid. they may be forced to find another job. Just because you enjoy what you do, doesn’t mean that you should work for free.
And as regards quality journalism, if we will no longer have articles that really investigate an issue, this is a dangerous threat to democracy.
My preferred medium for purchasing music is download. Living in Singapore, this allows me to get purchases immediately rather than having to wait a week and an half for shipping from Amazon etc. I also have all my music digitised and streaming around the house, so a download saves me this step. Most of my digital music is lossless or preferably hi resolution. I don’t have an issue with digital storage space (one of the perks working for a major hard drive manufacturer) and so take the view that I may as well get the best quality I can (I won’t reopen the debate on being able to hear a difference in this thread…..)
With that said, my bugbears with the record industry in relation to downloads are numerous……
1) I don’t understand why some albums are not available to purchase as a download. They are usually available on Apple Music, Spotify, or as an Amazon auto rip, so why can’t I buy ?
2) Related to the above, I usually go through the usual sites for legal downloads (Qobuz, HD Tracks, 7 Digital etc) but sometimes they are available only on the artists website. However these usually only specify that it’s a download with no informantion on format. Invariably it’s a crappy 128mbps MP3 file…..
3) Region restrictions – why can I buy a download in the US but not in the UK / Singapore etc. Using VPNs and PayPal usually gets around this, but it’s still annoying. There’s some stupid anomalies – I’ve had a few albums where they are available on 7digital UK but not 7digital Singapore, yet 3 or 4 of the individual tracks from the album are – so it’s obviously not a rights issue.
4) Deluxe Edition reissues. I like these and will usually try and buy with all the extra tracks. However quiet often I can buy the Hi Resolution version but it does not come with the extras (the Bowie box is a recent example). I’m usually paying a premium for the hi-res so I should at least expect the full package. Similarly, on those few occasions when i buy a physical box set with Blu Ray for some video, it often does not come with the hi-res files that are available to download.
5) I don’t want to buy vinyl – mainly as most wouldn’t survive shipping half way around the world and those that do would melt in the heat and humidity over here. However, there are many vinyl releases that come with hi-res download cards that I do want. Why can’t you sell these seperatly……
6) Deletions – why are albums deleted when there is digital versions. I can understand not wanting a new production run of a physical product, but surely there is no cost involved in keeping the digital version on sale ?
Bottom line, is that I still want to buy music. Please make it easy for me to do that. With all these restrictions, is it any wander people resort to the pirate sites to get what they want…..
Yes to all of that.
Point 4. None of the Bowie boxes have included the Re:Call discs in the high-res downloads. What’s that all about?
Agreed too.
What befuddles me, none of those things would be either difficult, costly or outside of their rights – and quite a few would just provide further income.
I have though seen that for some independent reissues on vinyl, thet have only been able to licence the vinyl and not the digital.
It is hugely sobering to roam around Spotify, festival websites, bandcamp etc and see the sheer bloody tsunami of bands that you will literally never have heard of, let alone heard.
Which makes me wonder how big a problem this actually is? If the business model is so disadvantageous to bands (and I don’t doubt you can’t really live off Spotify etc royalties) then why are there so many bands apparently not just playing in pubs but making albums, playing festivals, getting downloads etc?
I’m not denying this isn’t great economics for the band members, but from a consumer’s perspective I’m not aware of a dearth of interesting new music of whatever nature you could possibly want. So is it really a broken system?
The market has changed.
It is now far more cost effective (or accessible outside of corporates) to get your product made and distributed – but that is before either marketing & physical distribution or most importantly having enough consumers to sell to.
I seem to remember a while ago hearing or reading about how musicians can make a living by having a few thousand online followers who will buy everything they do, and who also gig fairly constantly. These bands will rarely scrape into the public consciousness, but have enough of a devoted following to work live regularly and sell a few thousand CDs a year.
Many performers self-produce some CDs to sell at gigs and it increases their earnings a bit/helps defray their costs a bit. If they have a website, to let their fans/followers know where and when their gigs are, then they may as well try and sell a few of the CDs from there too.
A solo artist, duo, trio or a quartet who do all of that and play a -lot- of gigs without having to travel vast distances to do so might be able to make a meagre living. The Hamsters (blues-rock trio specialising in ZZ Top & Hendrix tribute shows) made a living for 25 years, from constant touring on the UK pub and small rock club circuit from 1987 to 2012. They have now retired.
Btw, The Horrors album I mentioned in the OP – the one that had no sticker and had no mention on-line, even on their own website.
The unadvertised download is WAV – go figure….
Most of my pals in bands do it because they enjoy it and maybe because they get the odd free pint.