I wasn’t aware of this at the time or I would’ve blogged it, but in early 2006 a service called TuneCore launched. This service will take original music you’ve written and recorded and publish it on iTunes for you. (They’ll publish to other online music stores too.) The service costs the artist a paltry amount when compared to the benefits of exposing their music to millions of people. This kind of availability is approximately equivalent to having your CD in Target, right there on a shelf. This is a huge deal for independent artists.
The best part of the whole deal is that the owner of the music keeps 100% of the profits that come from the sales of their music. They don’t have a giant record label on their back, stealing the dollars right out of their hands as they earn them. The artist just has to sell approximately two copies of their album to pay for the cost of getting it in the iTunes store, and the rest is pure profit. You can’t lose!
So if you’ve been thinking of becoming a famous musician, but haven’t been able to get your music into the hands of a wide-enough audience, you just lost your last excuse. According to the data Steve Jobs gave in his most-recent keynote, iTunes sales averaged just under 3.3 million songs per day in 2006. If you got just 1% of one day’s total sales for only one of your songs, that’d be $33,000. Well, okay, it’d be $32,670, but you get the picture. And you’d have paid $11.96 to get that song on iTunes. That’s what I call a good opportunity.
Go write something catchy.