pampelmoose Dave Allen of Gang of Four’s Music and Media Blog

Portland band, Hockey, prepare to blast the Bay Area

As we noted in the Wal-Mart/Handelman story below, music sales are still in decline and haven’t quite found the bottom yet. Meanwhile retailers are getting creative at least. Insound.com is an online music retailer that focuses on alternative music mostly, if not exclusively, but I admit I haven’t dug that deep through the site. In 2006 they launched a campaign called ‘Save The Album’ which speaks for itself; at the time they wanted to save the idea of an album-length piece of work brought to you by your favorite indie band. The only problem with that premise was that a vast majority of music fans had given up on that medium as their preferred choice of music consumption as they were busy buying single tracks from iTunes and other online retailers and creating their own playlists - i.e. the new album format. Clearly Insound hadn’t noticed that the album was fast going the way of the Dodo; music consumers have spoken with their wallets and even iTunes has acknowledged that their customers buy way more single tracks rather than albums.

I’m not sure how successful that campaign was for their business but now they have another one called ‘Give more, Get More.’

From the Insound site - In case you haven’t heard Insound loves albums. We believe in albums. But, for years now, we’ve been hearing that the album is overvalued. [I believe they mean over-priced, ed.] That people don’t want to pay fifteen bucks for twelve songs. And for years, people explained their free album downloads by saying that “artists don’t get paid much (anything?) for their record sales anyway, so why support the record companies.” Or something like that…And for years, every time we heard those arguments, we wanted to puke.

Why Are We Doing This?
Where do we begin? Ummm…to save the album, to give back to bands, to give more to you, to help inspire music discovery, to change perceptions, to change the business model, to make a difference, to show we can.

Ok, this is all very worthy but who is supporting whom? Insound is a record retailing business that also sells downloads and they say their free MP3 page is their second most popular page. On there they are offering for every single digital album you buy, a free 10-15 song MP3 sampler. Insound seems to want it cakes and eat it - Those free MP3s are probably hurting their business as that is probably the only music that fans want; one or two tracks at the most, not whole albums.

As for the $.25 cents kickback, I can say right here that the royalties I’ve received for Gang of Four album sales over the years never came close to paying for my cigarettes and beer habit over the years. Retailers have always received the biggest slice of the pie from vinyl through CD. Record company slice came next, mechanical to publishers next, band? peanuts! So that $.25 isn’t going to make much difference at all. In fact bands would be better off getting into Amazon Downloads through a digital aggregator like CD Baby. Here’s the new soundbite that I like to drop - Bands are in the T-shirt business not the music business. Sell directly to your fans whenever you can.