June 22, 2005

"Your stockings had barely reached your knee before I knew..." - Karl Hendricks Trio.

Just a couple quick ones tonight:

Again, more interesting numbers, this time from Tiny Mix Tapes. While the figure isn't sourced at all, we have no reason to disbelieve TMT's claim that currently ITunes "in the U.S returns 60% of its revenue back to the major labels, but only 50% to the indies." That makes the slices of pie we mentally figured in our IODA discussion last month or the month before that much smaller for indie bands and labels the digital music provider works with -- through not fault of IODA, of course.

[Brief Aside: TMT also mentions a band in another post with a name we've been sitting on ever since reading and loving the Haruki Murakami book that inspired it about 8 years ago: The Wind-Up Birds. Oh well. We probably don't have too many more bands in us at this point anyway.]

So say a digital download costs an even dollar. Apparently 50 cents of that goes back to the indie label (60 cents if you are a major). Then we know from one of our friendly label heads that IODA takes 15%, of course we don't know whether that is 15% of the gross song price or 15% of the label's take. But we assume it is the latter. So then IODA gets 7.5 cents for the sale. Seems like a nice fair piece of the pie, and well worth it according to our source. Now would someone hurry up and get the Simple Machines catalog online for crying out loud!

SVC has a really great post that casts J Mascis and Kevin Shields as Highlander-type superheroes. Includes a hysterical mock-up of Mascis as a (or The? I don't remember how the mythos went in that movie any more) Highlander.

That is all.

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