NoiseTrade offers musicians a ‘pay what you want’ service, similar to the Radiohead thing that happened over a year ago now. Really. Perhaps more interestingly, they offer fans the opportunity to buy the album, or tell five friends about it and get it for free.
According to New Music Ideas reader Brent, who sent me the link:
Briefly, there’s a $250 setup fee that covers up to 20,000 downloads, then $75 for each additional 5000 downloads. You keep 90% of what is paid for your music and you get the names and email addresses of everyone who downloads.
Good idea? Is information on five new prospective fans worth giving the free album away? If you’re using the site, let us know. Let’s hear what you think.
I’ve said this on another music blog somewhere: Great site. Terrible pricing scheme. I would use the shit out of this thing if the pricing scheme were more reasonable. That’s an atrocious setup fee for something that enables you to give your music away for FREE. Then they take 10% of anything you do happen to make from it. I mean, I’d even pay $250 for the software if I could host it locally and deal with the bandwidth myself. But $250 per album for artists with a lot of albums is just not worth it.
I’m eager for someone to develop something like this I can run on my own server cheaper, or something with a much more reasonable setup cost. I agree that it’s a great tool, but prohibitively expensive.
I would immediately start using this if there either wasn’t a setup fee and a their share would be 5-6%, or would have to pay $200 and they would make no money off me until 10,000 downloads pass!
sorry if this sounds harsh but it seems they don’t believe in their own ability to sell music — so they are charging the musicians up front.
If they want to take a cut of my sales as the sales come in to pay for their service that’s fine – but I’m not supposed to be your customer.
I hate to be redundant, but…
1. Cool site design and interface.
2. Minimal and tasteful adverts (the only ad I saw was an add for paste mag which they also note in their onesheet – I guess a couple of the guys have or are working with that marketing group.)
3. A seemingly straight-forward, no hassle interface for fans to buy music.
4. All around great idea.
However…
5. Horrible pricing scheme. As stated by the other commentators, either charge me up front and leave my earnings alone or let me sign up for free and take a larger bite of my earnings. Definitely don’t do both. I wonder if they think this is a way for them to filter and attract only ‘serious’ artists to their platform…
> “filter and attract only ’serious’ artists”
If so they should select artists by themselves… i really don’t understand why we should pay for a service like that… they get free content, they can manage a good traffic, revenue with ads or additional services…
no thanks…
Love the concept here. By taking the nebulous content of “pay whatever” and focusing it down to “tell 5 friends” or “pay what you want” – and expressing those as big orange buttons, no less – they’ve created a site that would probably go over well with music fans and the lay public. It’s also something that would be easy for the artist to market.
Also, excellent job on the interface – all of the vital functions are emphasized and easy to use.
Of course, if they try to continue with this sign-up fee, it’s just not gonna fly. I’m happy to pay a percentage of the back end to my digital partners, but a steep up-front fee before I’ve seen a dime is an absolute deal-breaker for me. Here’s hoping they change their minds…
This reminds me a lot of the pay-to-play club schemes.
I’m not sure what you’re getting for your set up fee. Are they promoting your music or just setting up a page?
Unless the site has a large amount of traffic anyway, doesn’t seem worth it.