Today, Google has announced “Artists Hub”, a self service feature for Google Music, which will allow independent musicians to sell their own music.
Artists keep 70% of the revenue, and there’s no per album or annual upload fees.
The service lets independent artists come into the service and easily upload information about the band, along with single tracks or entire albums complete with artwork.
Here’s a video from Google Music about the new initiative:
This is an important feature that perhaps puts Google Music ahead of services like iTunes and Spotify, putting control of music right in the artists hands. Artists such as Coldplay, have decided to keep their latest albums off of services like Spotify, perhaps because they weren’t making the money they’d hope to from streaming their music.
The service will also intertwine with promotion on YouTube for artist’s music videos. Google is becoming quite the media powerhouse, and social is in the center of all of it.
Aspiring independent artists now registering at www.aurovine.com - Loved by Bands, Empowering Fans. 86% revenue share.
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LikeAs a web developer and one time Google fanboi, I would have been excited about this news 4 or 5 years ago. But, having beat my head against a number of Google services (a few are great, some are good, but many are barely usable), and being a very underimpressed G+ beta user, my expectations are, shall we say, quite muted.To be honest, they're going to have to do a LOT better on this than they've done on other services in order to surpass outfits like Bandcamp, Reverbnation, and CD Baby -- who all offer no cost or low cost sales solutions. Bandcamp, especially, has a very musician friendly system that offers perhaps the highest pay-out on online sales of any service I know -- with NO 'store rent.' AND it allows musicians to sell their fans truly LOSSLESS (*real* CD quality) downloads (in FLAC or Apple Lossless).
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Likeks2 problema Just to chime in, VibeDeck offers 100% of sales to their artists. They have fewer options than say BandCamp and NoiseTrade, which I agree are better than the G+ option. Thought I'd let you know about that one.
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LikeI give Google props for letting indies call their own shots, because it sets the tone for a total disruption of the world of greedy music labels. They'll no longer be needed if artists can distribute their tunes themselves through major retailers like Google.
However, I'm disappointed Google didn't introduce a streaming subscription service. Anyone in the know realizes it's the business model of the future.
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LikeBrad Williamson I'd recommend MOG. I investigated Spotify -- I"ve been a streaming music subscriber since 2005 [MusicMatch OnDemand, then Yahoo Music, then Rhapsody, now MOG] -- but the same day I signed up for a free Spotify account, an online friend suggested I check out MOG. When I found out that MOG was ALL 320 kbps -- while Spotify has some and promises more -- and that a desktop subscription was only $5/mo ($5 more adds your smartphone), I was sold. I sort of hated to leave Rhapsody -- but the sonic quality improvement at MOG was too much to pass up. And I've been overall delighted by MOG. [Full disclosure: I still use the old 'white' player, as it has more features than the new 'dark' player, like play queue shuffle which is a necessity for me. Don't know if new subscribers can get access to it.]
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LikeIs the Artist Hub actually available yet? I haven't seen any mention of a URL anywhere.
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LikeIt was.
music.google.com/artists
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