ELECTRIC AVENUE
Apr 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Kevin Arnold
It all seems quite unplanned and serendipitous looking back on it, but I somehow found myself in the spot where it seemed as if this was what I had unknowingly been building toward most of my life. After deciding not to pursue anything related to my architecture degree, I threw myself into concert promotion while still at Cal State and went on to be a booking agent and tour manager, during which time I started the Noise Pop festival (www.noisepop.com), also quite accidentally.
In the mid-'90s, I became jealous of many friends getting into the burgeoning technology game working at places like Wired and CNET, so I decided to get some skills and soon found myself being a systems and database administrator. I lived the corporate Silicon Valley dream (not) at Oracle for a few years and then heard about a new digital-music company starting in San Francisco called Listen.com that several friends worked at. It was the perfect combo of a technology job in a music environment, and during the next several years and building out of the Rhapsody music service, the genesis of the idea for IODA (www.iodalliance.com) began to form. It was seeing firsthand the problems that Rhapsody had in getting independent labels and artists online and the issues the indies had working with the services that inspired the business.
What exactly does IODA do, and how does it differ from competing services?
IODA creates technology services to help independent content owners make money in the digital marketplace. If that's too vague and high-level sounding, you could say we distribute and market music online. With regard to distribution, we help labels make their music available in the online world: encoding, managing metadata, licensing the catalog for download, streaming, mobile and PC use, delivering it to our partners, reporting royalties and providing an easy-to-use Web-based tool we call the Rightsholder Dashboard to ease the pain of managing and keeping track of all this.
On the marketing front, in addition to the retail marketing that most companies try to provide (pitching for promotions in stores), we've built a promotional distribution network called Promonet to help make our content visible on music-related sites across the Web, from small guys like blogs and podcasts to bigger ones like Last.fm and MP3.com. It also allows labels to track usage across the sites that feature their music and communicate with members of the network to promote their releases. We create innovative technology solutions and easy-to-use tools designed to help labels work more efficiently and intelligently. People like to work with us because our systems actually work, and we deliver on our promises, which can be rarer than you think in this industry.
How does IODA work with unsigned bands or bands on labels so small that they don't have any distribution?
We're striving to provide valuable services for labels and artists across a wide spectrum of situations and stages of growth. So labels from the small startup with just a few releases up to the largest indies in the business have a place with us, thereby creating an ecosystem that can serve the whole spectrum and provide a path for labels to grow. For the band just starting up, we have a number of partners and subdistributors to provide solutions. We have relationships with organizations like indie911 (www.indie911.com), Indie Pool in Canada (www.indiepool.com) or MP3.com.au in Australia and other niche distributors that offer varied value-added solutions such as extra marketing help.
Do bands have to sever any other relationships they have to use IODA?
It's problematic to have more than one digital distributor representing a release or catalog. Only one company can send an album to iTunes; otherwise, the same release would appear multiple times in the store. So while we let our clients work directly with some services, our relationship must be exclusive with regard to other digital distributors like CD Baby (www.cdbaby.com) or The Orchard (www.theorchard.com).
What does it cost labels/artists to work with IODA?
There are no upfront fees for encoding or setup or anything, just a fair percentage of digital sales. We consider the encoding and setup work we do for our clients as a sort of investment in the relationship on our part, which is part of the reason that we choose not to work with every artist out there.
How does IODA promote bands to Internet DJs, bloggers, podcasters, music supervisors, fans, etc.?
Now that the digital marketplace is delivering on the promise of making independent content available, the next challenge is to make it visible so that fans can discover and connect with artists. To that end, IODA has built a promotional-distribution network called Promonet that is focused on making content from our labels available to the many promoters and marketers across the Web. The network allows the marketing partners to use selected Promotracks on their site under a simple license that requires them to link to artist, label and digital retail sites online to help drive sales. Labels and artists can also use tools in the network like PromoMessages to alert the marketers to new releases and encourage them to spread the word. From our viewpoint, the Web is the shelf space for the digital world, and the best marketing strategy is to make your music visible in as many places as possible via the people who are most passionate about it.
Having been in the business for a while, what are some mistakes you've witnessed bands make?
I think it's important for bands to really focus on their music and making good art, play as much as possible and work to get exposure, but they should also be patient and persistent when faced with adversity. Good music will be recognized and find its fans; if things aren't working your way, think about why and go back and try again.
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