"...you dial up a shopping number through your TV’s computer modem and pick the title off a menu of new album releases. The digital recording is immediately sent to your computer, where it is downloaded onto a blank compact disc. You load a sheet of laminated, pre-creased cardboard into your laser printer, and out comes the printed sleeve, complete with credits, lyrics, and thank-yous. The price of the album is automatically charged to your American Express card."

Ok, so the above is a bit dated by what has actually transpired since 1993 concerning most online music related issues with regard to retail distribution. But the fact still remains that the Internet and the World Wide Web have changed the music business forever. Whether Online Music Distribution (OMD) will actually "level the playing field" indeed for those unsigned and independent musicians who are still creating some of the best music on the planet, remains to be seen.

For the purpose of this particular musings topic, I have chosen to focus on those aspects of OMD which primarily relate to musicians, and particularly the unsigned or independent variety of this artistically talented demographic of our population.

As you probably also see by the 1993 Musician Magazine excerpt above, even back then, a primary vision for using the technologies related to making quality music available on the Web was based upon the established music industry business perspective. Most of the excitement from those in the financial position to actually exploit this new frontier seemed to be based in a potential decrease in overhead and was to basically sell their recorded products more efficiently.

As things have turned out so far at this writing, I’m not certain if much initial thoughts or consideration was ever given to the actual musicians’ use of or benefiting from the technology - much less unsigned artists. I think that another aspect about online promotion, marketing and distribution which has been considered by the established industry, is the fact that the environment is so relatively unregulated in the sense that most civilized people are accustomed to.

It would be very difficult to control the Web in many of the ways businesses control their more traditional markets. The business environment of the World Wide Web often seems similar to the old "American Wild West" - only on multiple doses of various steroid medications, simultaneously. It is sort of like - make up the business plan as you go, heck with the rules, and even shoot the sheriff if he gets in the way of profit too often.

Nonetheless, by its inherent nature, the Web has afforded many unsigned musicians like myself with a potential global platform to reach audiences via our official websites. Despite the idealism and insistences of many, the World Wide Web is not free folks.

If you access through your college or job, you may not pay for it, but someone else is and does. So, remember that if you visit most any company’s pages online that someone has to pay for content development, maintenance, and hosting on a server somewhere. I think the amount of money spent on business webs would surprise most people like me - so, you can imagine that the monthly costs to operate music content provider websites are relatively significant. It is understandable that many web companies have found the need to generate a continuous stream of revenue in order to hope to "break even" eventually.

Particularly amusing to me is the fact that most of us musicians want everything for free, or at least as much as we can get for free - if totally free is not going to be a remote possibility. Just hire a band for a wedding, watch the food disappear, and you’ll see that my point here is a primal instinct among musicians - even foods unknown by the eating musicians will vanish down their throats...

If you think that this characteristic behavior can be modified, I say forget it. Wanting things free has been a tradition among musicians for centuries. We don’t think like most "driven people" do because of our muse. It is like most of us are so captured by the process of making music, that we often need free things to help us live when we don’t have a microphone in front of us. We don’t think about such things as food until we are on the verge of starvation, or basically until you hire us for a gig...

I admit that I used to have this type of mentality when it came to promoting, marketing and distributing my music online too. It is like I totally abandoned any practical business knowledge as a musician when it came to the World Wide Web and the Internet. It just didn’t seem "real" at first and besides none of the "real musicians" I knew took online music serious - they were too busy making music in the real world offline...

I also admit that none of the OMD sites’ really made sense to me, even three years ago when I started uploading my original recorded songs to so many of them. But, hey, it was FREE!

It never dawned on me that most of these sites were making money based upon people actually coming there because so many of us unknown musicians had put our music on their sites. It never occurred to me in the beginning why the set-up of most OMD sites made finding my music (among the other thousands of songs), so difficult.

Then it finally came to me one day, that it wasn’t the music that was actually generating the income for OMD, but advertising revenues - resultant from page views and advertising banner impressions viewed by visitors.

The advertising revenue model seems to have turned out to be a real loser for OMD sites. The list of defunct sites and bankrupt online music companies reads like the lyric of a sad song, among the extensive headstones within the dot com graveyard. The sites that do still remain are only mere images of their former selves in terms of vitality and activity from an artist perspective.

We artists were in effect serving most all of the OMD sites by promoting our individual pages to countless thousands of our intimate associates and general acquaintances via email marketing and bulletin board postings about our music online. The payback for us in the beginning was pretty good at most OMD sites and some musicians earned enough money to buy pretty nice houses. Whether any of them did or not, I do not know. I never earned very much money from OMD, but any further musings in this regard could be another separate article in itself.

If you put on your "business hat" with me for a moment, realize that promotion and marketing are based upon well conceived plans, with attainable goals. At most OMD sites with any form of profit sharing incentives for artists, the development and realization of such plans are often a great challenge to achieve.

In order to benefit from any promotional payback incentives, certain guidelines must be followed. OMD policies and practices where payback incentives are concerned, often seem to interrupt most any effective artist promotion strategy by redefining allowable promotion guideline parameters. So, it is difficult for most independent musicians to realize any form of coherent marketing plan for success.

It is understandable from a business standpoint that any sensible OMD company would want to minimize payout to artists for such promotional work of bringing visitors to the company website. However, what results from the company efforts to minimize such payments to member artists is that the quantifiable standards to achieve any reasonable degree of success for promotion efforts becomes out of reach. Thus, in order to succeed with OMD sites, most artists must employ promotional tactics which would not necessarily result in success as a musician, except at that particular OMD site.

In this day and age, I have learned to look at the Internet and World Wide Web as a supplemental marketing, distribution and promotion platform for my offline musical activities. I also have my own domain name and official web site. So, I honestly only need OMD sites for the so-called "marketing platforms" they should provide. I know that I am not the only musician who views the web like this. This approach just happens to work for me. To see some of the ways I have learned to use the Web, you can visit my official site at www.burnettmusic.com. But, what about the musician whose presence is primarily linked to one or more of the OMD sites? These artists seem to be at the "whims" of whatever suits those businesses at any given moment.

Like most musicians too, I most always sign a multitude of legal contracts whenever I provide my services offline for music gigs. Most all of the contracts that I sign are negotiated and usually also include "riders" for such things as how my musicians and I will be treated, PA equipment specs, food, accommodations, etc. You know the deal... But, from what I have seen in these years as an online artist is that the "contracts" (or artist agreements) that we "digitally sign" with OMD sites are very one-sided deals on behalf of the OMD business entity. And the sad thing for musicians is that it also seems that these OMD business can (and often do) reserve the right to "change the contract agreement" as they choose.

It now seems to have taken hundreds of us unsigned musicians several years of toil to realize that most music site OMD models, that actually are available resources to unsigned artists, do not work very well. I am among these artists who came to the realization that participating in advertising royalty sharing systems with OMD sites is a high maintenance promotional undertaking that most unsigned independent musicians seemingly cannot afford to engage. We musicians should be spending most of our time on our craft.

ARTISTS, CUSTOMERS, AND FANS

I have been a musician all of my life, no other job. Although the Internet and Web may seem to have "leveled the playing field" for independent and unsigned artists, it is still a business endeavor with regard to promotion and marketing and distribution.

1. Most OMD sites have now become "pay to play" situations for artists - meaning that you are actually now paying a hosting fee for having a presence with them.
2. The reality remains that there are still only a few of these sites that have the legitimate outside visitor traffic which may justify an unsigned artist’s expenses for membership.
3. Most OMD site traffic is largely that of its artist members - many artists continually bounce between different OMD sites for hours on end each day.
4. The Online Artist Community has developed into another entire sub-culture within itself - most online artists are big fans of fellow online artists’ music.

It just seems that most OMD sites that still do allow unsigned musicians to have a presence, now seem to be nothing more than "paid web page hosting services". In essence, you are still just one, among thousands of artists in the same boat, which is actually a fact based in a musician's reality anyway.

You are simultaneously content providers (artists), consumers of digital content (listeners), and patrons (visitor statistics) of these sites. All of this favors the OMD businesses. Most all OMD sites tell artists to "promote your site" to be "successful". However, the reality of the situation seems to tell artists not to be "too successful" or we will change the rules at our discretion. OMD in general is still very new...

Many of us unsigned musicians initially "bought into the whole shooting match" of OMDs in the beginning, but now it seems that many are getting wise to some of the less effective situations out there. Often it’s like doing business with your local music retail conglomerate chain store sales representative who works in the electronic instrument section on aisle G of sub-sector 7 within the store, and expecting your music career to be significantly enhanced just because you let these people sell you products.

As you can see, I have sort of come to my senses where OMD and my music career are concerned. I still think that OMD and the Web have a useful purpose for musicians, but such successful applications of it will be more in line with the old 1993 vision quoted at the beginning of this article.

I try not to cling too hard to the days of listening to Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) files that sort of sounded like "the song". Most of you know that there are still many MIDI sites on the Net. I used to create and listen to MIDI files and even swap them among friends back in the day. However, when technology allowed audio file compression to become reality, MPEG Layer 3 (MP3) makes the sound cards that play MIDI files seem very primitive by comparison. MIDI is to MP3, what the old ATARI games are to any X BOX game in this context.

The fact is that Napster overwhelmingly proved that most people will not pay for music they can have for free - any CD can be converted to music files and shared via the Web. So, how do you regulate that? I, like most everyone else, have my own personal feelings on this type of distribution issue. Peer To Peer (P2P) sites like Napster engage in a different form of online music distribution - although also listener driven. Even with all of the "big fuss" about the questionable aspects of the P2P music file swapping craze, it seems that CD sales went up - sounds like the result has been positively free publicity and marketing for many artists, whether wanted or not.

However, for the context and purpose of this writing, a P2P model cannot realistically be compared with OMD sites like the ones @ MP3.com, Artist Launch or Java Music - to name only a specific few. This is because although these companies are inherently different among themselves, they commonly serve actual musicians as a primary tenant of operations. It must also be stated that all of the different OMD sites also have their own presentation of offering some form of potential benefit to artists who join as member content providers.

Further, as stated earlier, the primary visitors to OMD sites are the member artists themselves. We are the ones who actually support the site, primarily because it is in our unsigned independent interests to do so. If the site goes under and we don’t have our own official web site and domain name, then it is back to the non-distinctive quagmire of those "free web page comminutes" as our only source for a web presence.

Another fact to consider about the Web in general: The fact remains that most users of the World Wide Web are affluent, relatively young, white, and male. Although this dynamic is becoming more diverse, how do you market certain styles of music to such a narrow segment of the listening public?

In its current state, OMD and particularly the MP3 sites that allow unsigned artists as members, are musician-driven ventures. These places would not exist, if not for the artist activity. It seems that no one wants to admit that fact , or say it "out loud", probably for fear of losing advertisers and investors. But, even such a probable fear is unfounded in logic. Think about it, member artists are also consumers and advocates of these OMD sites. We want to see them succeed, but we also want to be compensated for our efforts.

With regard to any agreed premises of receiving my share of the OMD company sponsored "advertising-revenue-profit sharing-type promotions", which are based upon the number of daily listeners at my OMD site, it should not matter who listens to my music that is posted there. I should receive credit due for "all listens" if that is the condition of payment. If the listens have been earned from the fact that supporters and fans played my songs each day, which are clearly within most OMD site guidelines, they should be valid. Since artists are also customers and patrons of such sites, it stands to sincere logical reasoning that fellow artists can thus also be defined as legitimate supporters and fans too.

However, it seems that when it comes to paying artists, some OMD sites cannot define a listener in other than vague terms. Artists have actually been denied earnings and some have even had their entire sites removed at one particular OMD, due to alleged gaming activities and findings that the effected artists were found to be in violation of company policy.  This left many of us who heard about all of this action confused.  We didn't want to get booted just because some other artist played our music.  I spent the better part of a month attempting to gain clarification and specific guidance on such matters from what is probably the largest OMD site currently available to unsigned musicians. I finally just asked the company official for simple "yes" or "no" responses - can’t be vague about "yes" or "no", can you? I guess you can if you don’t say anything, which is the case. I still have not received a reply to that particular message...

So, to answer my own question in the title of this particular musing - "Online Music Distribution: Is anyone really listening?" I say emphatically - YES! And I must qualify this by adding that most of the listening is indeed done by people who understand and appreciate most of the nuances contained in music. After all of this time online with OMD, taking in "the good, the bad, and the ugly", I have deduced that in no uncertain terms that the primary listeners at OMD sites are indeed the musicians themselves.

I say that such sites who portend to "pay" artists a royalty in essence for daily listens of their music, should set up a more standard system.  One that is more in line with what is the actual dynamic of OMD.  Hey, you know that most of your listeners are artist members.  Why not set up your profit sharing promotion to reflect that fact?  If a maximum earning limit were set each month for all eligible artists in the payout pool, "gaming the system" would not be such an enticement.  Artists could promote in a reasonable manner while also working under other than "sweat shop-like" conditions.  The incentive that now exists for those marginal musicians without a life away from their cathode ray tubes to "game your system" would then surely cease and desist!

So, how do you or your band get started with a practical presence online. First, add up the money you’ve already spent this year on promotion and marketing your music. Include any expenses for office supplies, telephone calls, auto expenses, etc. Look at the total expense ( does not have to be exact, just an idea). Now realize that for a fraction of that total expense, you can have a marketing and promotional presence that is always turned on to reach potentially millions of people all over the planet. Even with all of the growing pains and such, OMD is a pretty cool deal. No, it is not "free", but still a good deal in my opinion.

Here are some simple steps to help you narrow your goals and get familiar with using the Web and OMD as a promotional tool for your music career:

1. Visit several different OMD sites first hand and get a feel for what they are about, and what they are offering to do for member artists.
2. Decide what you want OMD sites to do for you.
3. Choose the OMD site or sites you want to have a presence with.
4. Seek to learn ways to maximize your presence and develop a functional understanding of the music business aspects of promotion.

These artists are experienced OMD musicians as well. Read their purpose for using OMD as they answer the interview questions, along with their own qualified opinions on OMD sites in general.

• Von Babasin
• Sheryl Clapton
• Pedro Costa
• Carmine D’Amico
• George Kahn
• Elliott Levine
• Phil Traynor

Cb has also made many musical friends online and would love to hear from you too. Stop by for a free tour, listen to some Cb tunes, and say hello at http://www.burnettmusic.com.