Zimbalam: Letting Artists Fly Solo

[David Tucker]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.zimbalam.eu/' target='_blank'>http://www.zimbalam.eu/</a><br /><br /></div><p><em>&ldquo;When Stian, a friend of mine, came to me a few days ago and told me I could now find his music on various online music services I just had to find out how. It's no secret that record companies are becoming more and more uselss with most of them being sadistic about both stealing the artist's money and chase pirates, but I was unaware of just how easy it had become to publish music on your own.&rdquo;</em></p><p>I don&rsquo;t necessarily entirely agree with this statement over at <a href="http://www.anythingbutipod.com/archives/2010/03/publish-your-music-for-30.php" target="_blank">AnythingButIpod</a> but I think that most of us can agree that the music industry is a dinosaur that does as much to hold back artists today as it does to promote them. For a few years now I&rsquo;ve wondered why many artists would really want to go the route of a big record company. For every successful artist that shows up on the radio there are hundreds of failures.</p><p><MORE /></p><p>Enter the service <a href="http://www.zimbalam.eu/" target="_blank">Zimbalam</a>. For &euro;30, which is approximately $40, you can self promote your own album to a variety of digital music providers. Zune isn&rsquo;t, unfortunately, one of the listed providers because I would happily support artists through this to encourage the practice.</p><p>Zimbalam holds no rights to the artist&rsquo;s music and pays 90% royalties to the artist. Digital music stores have no real physical space constraints so there is little reason for Amazon, iTunes, Zune or any others to want to limit the amount of music available. Zimbalam has little to no cost associated with each individual album, so they win by generating revenue from every sale. It doesn&rsquo;t matter where the sale comes from for them.</p><p>The artists definitely win because they can get exposure that they might not normally get and still retain the rights to their own music. Local artists often get played on the radio so it isn&rsquo;t as if bypassing a big record company is going to prevent artists from getting radio time. I&rsquo;m sure that this type of scenario is exactly the reason that the RIAA has always feared the digital age. It makes them look a little obsolete.</p>

[albucian]

As mentioned in the ABIPOD article (in the comments :cool:) there are other companies providing similar services such as ReverbNation (http://www.reverbnation.com) and Tunecore (http://www.tunecore.com).

But again no zune marketplace:(.

Cheers!:)

[David Tucker]

I wonder what it would take to get Zune to support these efforts. Especially since Zune, especially in its earliest days, seemed geared towards these types of artists.

[albucian]

Perhaps it is more complex than it seems. For exemple, Reverbnation, although they don't publish artist material in the zune marketplace, they do have business interactions with Microsoft. Recently they both organized together a windows 7 promotion thing including many indie artists registered with Reverbnation -->http://www.reverbnation.com/playlist7

Perhaps the existence of the zune pass is not facilitating some type of contracts.

[Jason Dunn]

I wonder what it would take to get Zune to support these efforts. Especially since Zune, especially in its earliest days, seemed geared towards these types of artists.

Yeah, that does seem kind of strange...I wonder if the Zune Marketplace isn't big enough yet for these companies to care about.

[Zimbalam]

Hi guys and thanks for the kind words about Zimbalam.

We spotted the article and wanted to let you know that we do actually distribute music to the Zune Marketplace! It's actually 'powered by' one of the stores we distribute to but music that is uploaded to 'All Stores' using Zimbalam in the UK or USA should appear on the Zune Marketplace. As it's powered by a separate store we don't list it directly as one of the stores but we will be sure to add a logo so users know we're covering the store!

We have also introduced, as of Friday, a new deal where artists receive 100% of their royalties for the same up-front fee, instead of the 90% quoted in the article. Now, instead of giving up 10% of every sale we have added a new low annual fee that is deducted from royalties instead, meaning artists stand to make a lot more from their music and as we deduct the fee, rather than charge your account, there's no risk to keeping a release online!

Kevin Rowe is just one of the many artists using Zimbalam currently live on Zune Marketplace: http://social.zune.net/album/Kevin-Rowe/10am/adda0c02-0100-11db-89ca-0019b92a3933/details

Thanks again and if you have any other questions feel free to email us: [email protected]

[Jason Dunn]

Hi guys and thanks for the kind words about Zimbalam.

Thanks for stopping by and letting us know more details! :)

[David Tucker]

Oh this is good to hear! Glad that Zune is actually part of this.:)