Michael Gogins

I’m looking at TuneCore… for a pretty reasonable flat fee, you upload music and it appears on digital music stores, including iTunes and eMusic. As far as I can tell, TuneCore and Amazon.com are planning to implement CD publishing-on-demand following the same model.

For the first time in the history of music publishing and distribution, there is a completely flat playing field. For a mimimal fee that most can afford, music can be published to the World Wide Web and anyone with an Internet connection or a cell phone can access it. One wonders what will become of record companies.

I am probably going to try TuneCore out for my next album….

Some form of intermediation will probably creep back into the system, now that TuneCore has effectively removed most of it. But will the new middlemen be paid by the creators, or will they be paid by the audience, or both? In other words, new forms of intermediation (helping the audience find music they will like) could take several forms. The new middlemen could be reviewers, whose reputation would ensure a listen for music they recommend; or they could be agents or publicists paid by the creators; or they could be a new version of the record companies, setting up a brand and using their own A & R people to sign up creators. Which of these happen can be inferred from thought experiments on trying to make money. There is only limited money in acting as an agent unless the creator is phenomenally successful, in which case one morphs into a brand, a new form of music publisher. I think there is probably room for reviewers if they can figure out how to get paid, but to some extent they can be paid by ads on their pages.

But no matter what happens, this is wonderful!