Free New Albums

The new album from Swedish metal band In Flames, A Sense of Purpose is available streamed for free from their myspace page from today for one week. Streaming rather than full MP3 releases seems to becoming a trend as at first glance it means that the music isn’t so free and easy to copy and affect actual album sales.  But there are tools around that will dump a MySpace stream directly to an mp3 file on your PC, so bands need to ensure that they are aware of this.

The real CD release will be as follows:  Japan – March 26th, North America – April 1st, Sweden – April 2nd and Europe – April 4th.

There is also a bunch of other stuff to do with the new album available: the new video, “The Making Of The Mirror’s Truth – the video”, older songs and videos PLUS see a new Documentary!

An interesting post on Slashdot has reminded me that I intended to publish a piece on how the money from a CD sale is shared out. But the article points to a Rolling Stone article from a good few years ago (2004!!) with a breakdown.Obviously this is of interest in these days of free downloads as the money an artist needs to recover in sales may not actually be as much as you may think.  There are other costs such as web hosting, streaming etc. but nothing that matches the sheer overload of record label costs. 

1. $0.17 Musicians’ unions
2. $0.80 Packaging/manufacturing
3. $0.82 Publishing royalties
4. $0.80 Retail profit
5. $0.90 Distribution
6. $1.60 Artists’ royalties
7. $1.70 Label profit
8. $2.40 Marketing/promotion
9. $2.91 Label overhead
10. $3.89 Retail overhead

 Now these may or may not be fair for a CD release - that’s another discussion. But for artist led free releases on the Internet, such as we have seen recently, we can lose some of the listed items.

Number 1: I’m not up on musician unions in the US music biz, so I’ll leave it in for now. 

Number 2 goes - no physical product;

Number 3: For a self-released free album, the publishing royalties will usually roll up to the artists concerned, so in my example - GONE. 

Number 4 goes too - no retail product, therefore no retail costs.

Number 5. Distribution? What distribution? GONE.

Number 6: Part of the profit pot left at the end… GONE. 

Number 7. On the fence. If the free release is by the artist themselves then this will roll up into the overall profit figure. But if a record label is still involved, they might like to keep a small piece of the pie…

Number 8 is very different in the Internet realm. The early free-releasers have benefited from invaluable free publicity all around the world. Personally for top bands I think this will continue as the model is just so different and therefore newsworthy. If any grade 1, top tier, bestselling artists allow free downloads they WILL get mentioned in and on the mass media.

Number 9. Pushing it now.

Number 10. Gone. C’ya. Byeee.  So what does that leave?

1. $0.17 Musicians’ unions 

 Oh. Well we haven’t included bandwidth, hosting etc. Plus studio time, remastering etc., so let’s reinstate the label overhead of $2.91. That gives us a total of:

$3.08 !!!

 So anything averaging over $3.08 per sold copy is going to lead to profit. And note that if the model (as it appears to be turning) is going to be: a free version online, working people towards the paid CD versions, expensive collectors versions etc. then the actual average paid is going to be a LOT higher (as Trent Reznor found out after $1.6 million arrived) 

For the next two weeks, starting today (March 25th) pop over to the Pennywise MySpace page and grab their new album - Reason to Believe - for free. Yes, it’s streamed using the MySpace player, but if you want to hear it now that’s the only way.

Does it Offend You, Yeah? have got the first half of their new album You Have No Idea What You’re Getting Yourself Into available for free streaming on NME.com, a week before the album is released. And to cap it off they will have the second half of the album available streaming also on NME.com from this Wednesday 19th March.

Quite an interesting way of whetting the appetite of fans, and also fairly protective of the artists and the release. But it allows you to listen for free, so get yourself over to NME.com right now, scroll down the Does it Offend You, Yeah? page until you get to the Media Player section and you’ll get the msuic.

If heavy metal is your thing, then get to the Mercenary page on Myspace.com to hear their new album - Architect Of Lies - in full. Streamed using the regular Myspace player, this gives fans and the curious the chance to hear the whole album before it’s released on 26th March.

No news on whether the tracks will continue to be available for free after the album is released on CD, CD/DVD and Vinyl. But there are ways around the MySpace stream if you are that way inclined.

Album tracks after the fold..

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For a while now we have thought that madonna will follow Radiohead’s lead and release her new album Hard Candy (due out in April 2008)  for free on the Internet. Now checking back through the story on Wikipedia seems to show that this won’t happen due to the fact that they seem to have stamped on every leak of the album tracks as soon a sthey can.

But. I have this feeling that she will pressure them to do this. yes it’s her last album with Warners, so they want to milk it, but what better way to milk it that have all of the world’s media reporting on her latest album? Free advertising. Let’s face it, most people won’t download it. Madonna sells MILLIONS upon MILLIONS of CDs. Most of her potential customers simply won’t know anything about downloads. But that free advertising… hmm. Even a time limited special could be interesting…

Let’s keep a watch out. End of April is when the album is due, so we might start hearing things about it soon. 

Iron Maiden, they of guitars, hair and heavy metal are to release a free download via their website from May 12th 2008. The album will consist of 15 tracks selected from the seven studio and one live album released during the 80s.

This is good news for fans of the band and people with a slight interest, but unfortunately there is a downside. The release will only be available as DRM’d WMA files, encoded at 320Kbps, but will expire after only 3 plays. At that point, you will be able to buy a DRM free download .

The full track listing is as follows:

• Churchill Speech
• Aces High
• 2 Minutes To Midnight
• The Trooper
• Wasted Years
• Children Of The Damned
• The Number Of The Beast
• Run To The Hills
• Phantom Of The Opera (live)
• The Evil That Men Do
• Wrathchild (live)
• Can I Play With Madness
• Powerslave
• Hallowed Be Thy Name
• Iron Maiden (live)

you can either go with it or sit back and watch it happen, and I would rather be out on the field than in the bleachers.

So says Michael Stipe about the revolution in free downloads of albums. R.E.Ms latest release, Accelerate will be available online from March 24th 2008 in a streamed format via the site www.iLike.com . It might not be as brave as other artists, with only a window of a week before the CD release and a streamed format rather than a downloadable format, but it’s still a step in the right direction.

However, this does feel more like an extended advert for the album, much like a radio station playing an important new release in it’s entirety.  There is no sales model on the back of the free download (or at least not announced yet) - ie. it is free streaming for a week and then buy the CD. They appear to have simply diverted marketing budget from one place to another and hope that the free publicity will cover any losses.

But. It is a step the right way, and when other artists - and the labels - realise that releasing material for free doesn’t have to affect sales then we will see more an more artists releasing new albums for free.

PS. there’s quite a bit here for free as well…

The new Charlatans album You Cross My Path will be available on vinyl and CD from 12th May 2008, but from 3rd March 2008 it can be downloaded for free! Just to sort any confusion this is “The Charlatans UK” as we know that our American cousins name them differently…

Very well known for 1990’s The Only One I Know, this new album will be the band’s 10th studio album! That’s not a bad throughput really!

Of course the free release is balanced by the special releases that come a few months later. In this case, fans can pre-order a deluxe CD with a ticket to a concert date for their upcoming tour. The CD set includes an extra CD of live and studio recordings and a poster. All for £35.99 / $72.  There’s not much details about the special vinyl release yet, but it sounds like it could be a boxset of 7″ vinyl with the album spread over multiple sides. Sounds nice!

Trent Reznor has long played with the music business. He famously left (maybe not personally!)  left memory sticks in bathrooms at NIN concerts with new unreleased tracks on. He setup websites and phone lines and had this whole thing going on that the fans decoded bit by bit.

Well this time, he’s done it again. The new album Ghosts I-IV is a 36 track instrumental album, released on March 2nd 2008. There are a number of options available:

1. Free download of the first volume
2. $5 download of all 36 tracks
3. $10 double CD set
4. $75 deluxe set
5. $300 Ultra Deluxe specila edition set limited to 2500 copies

That last one may seem like a bit of a flyer, but it sold out in the first day.

Even the free download is free from DRM, released under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license and comes with a lovely PDF file to print off and keep.