A few months ago, I met the classical music representative from iTunes, at Skywalker Studios where Magnatune artist Lara St John was recording a new album. Lara has a separate agreement with iTunes, and she's one of their best-selling artists.
I struck up a conversation with him, and now have a good relationship with iTunes (at least on the classical side).
They indicated an interest in promoting some of our new releases (the ones that interest them), if we were willing to give them an exclusive time period, where the album was only available on iTunes, and not on the Magnatune web site.
We're trying that now, with a recording by Philharmonia Baroque of Beethoven's 9th, which iTunes now has for sale at their store. iTunes is advertising the album on the top of the classical page (the ad rotates with a few other ads).
Apple isn't yet giving us the power indicate "no DRM" but as soon as they do, we'll be selling no DRM audio on iTunes.
In other news, I've been working with digital distributor IODA for a few months to help them finalize their bulk-import standard. IODA will help us get the rest of our catalog into iTunes, because we've found that iTunes mostly doesn't like to work directly with non-major labels. I just got notification from IODA yesterday that they're ready to start importing using their new XML import standard. We're the first with them to ever use this new bulk method, as previously every album had to have all its details hand-typed into an excel spreadsheet. Magnatune music should start appearing on iTunes fairly soon now, which I'm excited about. It should also appear on eMusic and a few other music services.
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