It’s never been easy to run an indie record label, but these days the rapidly changing business climate makes it a special challenge. Tower Records, the biggest brick-and-mortar retailer in the States to specialize in deep-catalog and independent offerings, has gone bankrupt and will soon close its 89 stores. Big-box outlets are thriving–last year Wal-Mart, Best Buy, and Target sold more CDs than anyone else, online or off–but they focus almost exclusively on current hot sellers. If it doesn’t move quickly they won’t stock it, and that leaves most indie releases out in the cold. It’s hardly news that labels have had to adapt to the upsurge in digital downloading–in 2005 the iTunes store was the seventh-largest music retailer in America, becoming the first dedicated download provider to crack the top ten–but for smaller operations, meeting that demand has become a question of survival.
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Bettina Richards, owner of Thrill Jockey, is trying to claim her piece of the action by building a better mousetrap. Her label already offers a rare online amenity: full-length streams, not snippets, of every song from every release in its catalog. “I believe if people can listen to the albums, they tend to buy them,” she says. “The other key thing is that each record has its own page, and as you listen to it you can read the bio or whatever the artists want to say about the record.” The Thrill Jockey site has been offering downloads of the label’s music for a year, and Richards says some of her recent jazz releases have racked up 40 percent of their sales through digital-only outlets. At the end of November she’ll formally launch a more comprehensive download service, which will join the handful of existing label portals that offer music both from their own catalogs and from those of other imprints–including Bleep.com, founded by Warp Records, and the site run by indie hip-hop tastemakers Definitive Jux.
The labels Richards will be distributing digitally are mostly small, cutting-edge European operations whose releases are unavailable for download on their own sites and tough to find in the States–the Austrian imprint Editions Mego already has some of its catalog on the site, which along with
Thrill Jockey has done well on iTunes and eMusic–it’s consistently been one of the latter’s top ten sellers–and will continue to sell music through those services. But Richards wants the option to set her own terms. Though iTunes works like an ordinary distributor, paying a flat fee for every download–usually between $5.50 and $7 for an album–eMusic uses a less predictable revenue-sharing model. Because it offers subscriptions, a user can pay as little as 25 cents per track, and participating labels get a cut that’s prorated according to eMusic’s total revenue for the period–that is, their revenue can vary greatly from month to month even if they sell the same number of downloads. Richards’s approach is simpler: each label will get seven of the ten dollars customers pay for a full album (the site isn’t offering individual tracks), and Thrill Jockey will get the other three. For the distributed labels, that’s just as lucrative as most of the ways to sell an actual CD, and they don’t have to worry about returns.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Mireya Acerto.
