You can now keep up to date with new albums from Magnatune, announcements, discussions and the blog, from your RSS reader.
RSS feeds to new Magnatune releases
http://forums.magnatune.com/read/rss?forum=all-magnatune-releases&rev=0.92
RSS feed to Magnatune-announcements
http://forums.magnatune.com/read/rss?forum=magnatune-announcements&rev=0.92
RSS feed to Magnatune Discussion
http://forums.magnatune.com/read/rss?forum=magnatune-discussion&rev=0.92
RSS feed to Buckman's Magnatune Blog
http://blogs.magnatune.com/buckman/index.rdf
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Mac Stuffit versions of both AAC and MP3 files.
All purchasers can now download Macintosh-native Stuffit versions of their album, in either AAC format (best form iTunes) or as 256k MP3 files.
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Music licensing representation of some music with http://www.go4music.de
Through our german label partner http://www.novatune.de, the german music licensing company "go4music" www.go4music.de will be representing several magnatune musicians for music licensing in Germany.
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Free album of their choice to all of last year's buyers
Magnatune is now one year old! To celebrate, we'll be offering a free album download of their choice to everyone who ever bought an album on Magnatune. Not only does this express our thanks (and boy are we thankful!) , but it should also re-interest people in Magnatune who haven't had the time to come back and explore the music.
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Early Music America Magazine article
Read it at:
http://magnatune.com/info/press/
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New "what's new" page lists all artists by date
http://magnatune.com/artists/new
If you click on the "more..." link on the home page, at the bottom of the "New artists" list, you will come to a new page at Magnatune, which lists all albums at magnatune, in order of the date in which they were added. This makes it easy to quickly catch up on the new albums at Magnatune since you last visited.
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PHYSICAL CDs OF MAGNATUNE MUSIC COMING SOON
I'm finalizing things with a company who will printing CDs on demand for Magnatune. The contract is signed, and we've sent a sizable startup fee to then, so it's really happening now.
You can see what the printed CD and packaging will look like here:
http://www.magnatune.com/private/cdpackaging.jpg
When buying music from Magnatune, people will be able to choose to "postal mail me a CD of this music" for an additional $4.97 ($7.97 international), postage cost included. The $4.97 is my real cost, and I don't plan to make any profit on manufactured CDs. I'll be telling the buyers that this is Magnatune's real billed cost, and we'll still be asking for $8 for the music (which will be split 50/50 with the artist).
So, for about $13 ($16 international), people will be able to receive a real CD of any of Magnatune's music. The CD face and Jewel box artwork will be full color, but generic for Magnatune (not specific to the artist) but will include artist name, album name and a song listing (printed in black ink on full-color generic magnatune artwork). I've worked really hard to bring the cost down, and yet still have a decent looking package (ie, a jewel box, not a sleeve, and full color artwork), and am quite happy with this arrangement. Unlike the other company I almost went with, these people seem to know their stuff, so I'm hopeful this'll work well. The CDs will be made from uncompressed WAV files, ripped from the master CD, so the quality will be CD-perfect (no CDs made from mp3s !)
We're still a few weeks away from offering physical CDs, as there is a lot of work on our end to make it happen (artwork design, bidirectional XML interfaces with the other company, new order forms in all 3 payment methods, getting them 180gb of WAV file data with XML meta-data), but I'm hoping to start offering this toward the end of June.
Note that once we're offering physical CDs, we'll be adding music less frequently to Magnatune (same amount per month, though) as there will be more involved in adding a new album, specifically, getting the music to our CD manufacturer and merged into their database.
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WEBJAY
Listener created playlists on the web
We submitted all the Magnatune music to the Webjay database, so that playlist creators on Webjay can add our songs. I've noticed Brad Sucks, Thursday Group and Jeff Wahl on a few playlists. This is a great way for a larger audience to find out about Magnatune's music.
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Our music in "Photoshow" software (by Simpel Star Inc.)
http://www.simplestar.com/landing/ps_a/
"Photoshow" is a program which makes musical slideshows of your own photographs, which you can then email to your friends and family. The slideshows are actually Macromedia Flash files, so they're small, cross platform and easily played.
The upcoming version of Photoshow will feature 100 songs in the application, so that users (and there are tens of thousands of them) can use Magnatune music as a background to their photo slideshows. The Magnatune artist and URL gets a credit (and link) at the end of the show, as well as a large mention in the auto-email generated when a show is sent to a friend or family member. Great exposure.
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Nice Music License Example
http://www.normanrose.com/
The Normal Rose photo studio licensed some music from Lara St John for their new web site. I'm giving the URL, because it's a great example of a music/flash web site.
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Artists over Time Report
http://magnatune.com/info/stats/
New report: click on the number of artists on the info page, and you'll see a line chart showing artists added over time to Magnatune. We added a little over 150 artists during our first year.
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Cubase SX book has Emma's Mini Remix
http://magnatune.com/info/press/
The 2nd edition of the Cubase SX Visual Quickstart Guide includes a remix of Magnatune's Emma's Mini, how it was done, and info about Magnatune.
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Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnatune
We were pleased to see that Magnatune merited an entry in the Wikipedia.
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The Rock and Roll Report
http://www.rockandrollreport.com/the_rock_and_roll_report/2004/05/another_look_at.html
The Rock and Roll Report takes another look at Magnatune
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Music licensing detail
http://magnatune.com/info/images/license_detail_example.gif
All musicians at Magnatune now have access to a "music licensing detail" page which lists all the music licenses, and links to the actual invoice the licensor received. This allows the musician to see who licensed their music, for what use, and they can see the eventual site/product that uses their music.
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Web site hits, visitors and sales were again the same as the past 3 months, no change of more than 5% on any statistic. While we did a lot more licensing (40 last year, 16 of which were last month) the income from that licensing is very small, as most of it was for film festival licenses to indie films.
The bad news is that sales have dropped by 30%, starting about a week ago, coinciding with graduation time at Universities in America. I hope that they'll pick up in a few weeks when kids get home, but we might be in for a slow summer.
I'm also hoping that offering physical CDs will encourage a whole new audience to start buying Magnatune's music.
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We had 16 music licensing deals this month, specifically:
04.05.30 Paul Berget
04.05.27 Ehren Starks
04.05.27 Ehren Starks
04.05.27 Hans Christian
04.05.26 Scott Hill
04.05.26 The West Exit
04.05.26 Reza Manzoori
04.05.20 Lara St John
04.05.20 Saint Elijah Childre
04.05.19 Wicked boy
04.05.15 Leon McCawley
04.05.14 Ehren Starks
04.05.13 Trip Wamsley
04.05.08 Cargo Cult
04.05.06 Beat Under Control
04.05.05 Lara St John
many of these were for low-budget indie films which are currently at the "film festival" level, so the income from these licenses is very small ($44 per song) but if the films get "picked up" we'll see a nice additional license payment. More importantly, Magnatune is getting a reputation as a place for indie film-makers to get music, which can only bode well for the future.
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the end