Introduction
This is is intended as a place-holder for ideas on how Drupal can help a site admin in charge of a label/artist site.
In other words, as well as offering the obvious content editing capabilities I'd like to raise the question "what can Drupal do for You?" in the context of a site admin in charge of a label/artist site.
Using Aggregators/going direct using Drupal?
It's a given that a lot has changed over the last few years with music online. Probably one of the biggest changes is the end of artists/labels uploading content for free to sites and getting nothing in return. Artists and labels were happy to upload content to myspace.com, youtube.com and many other sites, just to get some exposure and watched as those sites sold for hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars while at the same time received no royalties.
In many respects, the same thing that happened radio is happening music online...i.e. it was deemed unfair that a radio station could make huge ad revenue profits on the back of the broadcast of music and give nothing back to artists and labels. In the same way, sites like last.fm, myspace.com, youtube.com and many others are being forced to play by the same fair rules.
Since that started happening, the doors opened up for a whole raft of new music services like spotify.com, we7.com, comes with music and many others, where consumers have unlimited music downloads via a handset-bundle deal, subscription or ad revenue based model.
Aggregators are the new distributors
At the same time, the growth of DIY and independent labels exploded (Independent music accounts for almost 38% of total music sales globally now) which introduced 2 big challenges i.e. (a) how do the big content sites broker deals with all those independent labels and (b) how do they get all the music content?
With online shops like itunes, amazon mp3 and others, it was relatively simple to link the deal back to the retail sale price and apply "wholesale" prices that all labels could accept and a flurry of music aggregators like the orchard, Cdbaby.com, dittomusic.com, Tunecore.com and many others sprung up filling that gap between shop and label which not only provided access to the big shops for small labels, but, also provided digital music warehousing services.
Online Music Aggregators keep things very simple for labels big and small. It means the label has one central accounting hub, one central "digital warehouse" and one payment/cheque that covers all the services. As a simple example, While it's technically feasible for a label to deal direct with new online music services, it's much easier for a label that is already with cdbaby/the orchard.com/other to simply click on a button to get their music up on a new service like spotify.com than it is to go direct.
Let's not forget that labels are in the business of making music and are very happy to offload the technical headache involved in warehousing digital music and related services.
Selling direct using Drupal
The big upside of all these new music services (listed above) is that a label isn't stuck with just thinking about album sales as the key revenue generator. It's possible now to satisfy 3 types of fans now i.e.
(a) curious fan - free downloads via spotify/comes with music or other music service
(b) lukewarm fan - low quality downloads bought on itunes
(c) hardcore fan - deluxe boxed sets & special releases, t-shirts, merch, gig tickets.
Radiohead illustrated this brilliantly with their In Rainbows album launch..where lukewarm/curious fans could download a low-quality preview of the album for free/donation, buy a full album download/cd in the shops/online or buy a special boxed set including vinyl and books.
The one big downside of labels working with these new music services through aggregators is the lack of data capture - i.e. when a label receives their itunes statement, they know a person bought a particular song on a particular day...but, they don't know who that person was, what their email address is or how they can get in touch.
However, I think it is possible for a label/artist site admin to use Drupal to catch the lukewarm and hardcore fans by selling low, medium and high quality downloads and merchandise direct from their site. In other words, the curious fan will still be able to get free previews via spotify and other services, but, lukewarm and hardcore fans could be tempted by a drupal driven site offering the following download options and prices:
(a) MP3 128kbps (no DRM) - 0.33cents per song
(b) MP3 320kbps (no DRM) - 0.45cents per song
(c) Exact CD quality (WAV/AIFF) - 0.69 cents per song
(d) 5.1 Surround mixes (WAV/AIFF)- 0.99 cents per song
The big value in offering that service via a Drupal site compared to a sale on itunes music store, for example, is the fan details. In other words, the label/artists not only receives money for the sale, but, they also receive the persons name and contact details.
Syndicating content using Drupal
Between Facebook, myspace, bebo.com and many other social networking sites, it's getting more difficult for a site admin for a label/artist site to keep up and ensure all the various networking sites are updated. With most networking sites offering api's now, Drupal can help with the syndication of news, previews and tour dates by acting as a hub to syndicate content. So a site admin can simply update the core drupal hubsite and drupal automatically updates the others.
Members area
Self explanatory. The default Drupal download comes with the ability to have a fan members area on a label/artist site.
comment #1
One possibility, however, is that the site admin would want to run two separate Drupal installations, one for delivering the content, another for managing a members' area. These would ideally be connected, so that commenting, etc was linked.
By separating these areas into different sites, upgrading and maintaining would be made easier, as each one would have a smaller set of modules and permissions and content-types to manage.
Comments
re: multi-site installation
I agree with the point about mult-site installations. However, I would see that as more applicable to a label maintaining multiple artist sites, rather than a single site split into two.
Can you expand a little on why you would use a multi-site install for an artist/band site?
re: multi-site installation
My thinking may be faulty, but here it is.
The main artist area is a content-delivery site. It should focus on allowing the artist to present and deliver content. It should be simple to manage and easy to upgrade, easy to migrate data in and out of, easy to export and back up, and easy to transition from if at some point the artist needs to pursue a different solution.
With the main area, you don't want to deal too much with permissions and sign-on.
On the other hand, the members area is a community site. It should be built around discussion, with the possibility of profiles, walls, user-customization, chat rooms, etc. Ideally you could migrate from existing forums, or migrate to other forum solutions if necessary. More importantly, the state of this would probably be changing more frequently, with the addition of new features occurring regularly. This means a more constant state of installing and uninstalling modules, and changing data types.
The increased instability would seem to me to make this a prime candidate for being its own entity.
One can also imagine use cases in which one forum would be used for multiple bands, etc.
I'm not saying everyone would want this, but it is currently the solution I am pursuing myself.
I see what you mean..
I think I understand what you're saying....are you essentially isolating the generic or public content from the busy members area by using a seperate Drupal site for each area?
It would be interesting to hear more about your approach..e.g. does the admin have to login again to edit content on the "public" drupal install or is there a shared login session thing going on?
As an aside...have you tried the boost.module? That is useful for improving the delivery of drupal content...such as the sort of non-dynamic content you normally find in a "public" area of a website...content that is updated now and again rather than refreshed on each page load. One could could use boost.module for the public content you're talking about...as it generates static html of those pages when you update that content.
dub
Working on it...
Currently I'm just doing two separate sites. But I probably want to implement a shared login.
My current thought is that the members site will contain all the members and their login information, but that I will allow the main, public site to access this information, so that members can comment on the main site as well.
This would mean that the only presence of the members in the main site would be the basic info (name, email), but that the members site could contain all types of profile content and so forth.
I guess this could be a situation where one site is providing profiles and discussion information, and allowing other sites to access the basic info, and link back to those profiles.
I'm not yet sure that this all makes sense. What do you think?
PS. Thanks for pointing out the modules. Looks promising.
community pages
thanks for taking the initiative with the music distribution dub. i think it is a great idea.
One thing I can see drupal helping bands and artists with is building a big community page that pulls content from myspace, bebo and other social networks into the band site. most bands have a myspace page and pages on other social networking sites, so instead of just linking to the myspace page and sending the visitor away from the band site, I think it would be smarter to pull content like the myspace comments, friends list etc. in a similar way to how you did these myspace snippets that pulls the gigs/tour calander. So you end up with one big landing page on the artist site that depicts activity on all the social networking sites. maybe using panels to organise the different content?
Also, it would be amazing if we could just update the drupal site and automatically update all the other social networking pages. So when the band updates the news on their main drupal driven site, it automatically updates their myspace blog, their last.fm journal and facebook page.
Is that possible?
phil
great idea
the myspace snippets are very basic, phil, but thanks anyway.
have you looked into the automatic crossposter (to other social networking sites) in more detail? I know that myspace released some sort of api recently, but, I'm not familiar with what it can do. there is a live journal cross poster already for Drupal, which maybe adapted but I would be keen to know if anyone has jumped into this area.
dub
Possible, but difficult
Some of the APIs allow this kind of posting, but many do not. I think it has to do with the social networks wanting people to log in and interact with other users, and with the advertisers on that social network. I've been taking stock of what the APIs have to offer for this purpose and once I collate my results, I'll make the information public and let you know about it. Even if the API doesn't support posting, there are ways of getting around that. Those ways are usually a bit of a pain.
Speaking of which, is there a PHP equivalent to the Perl module WWW::Mechanize? Is the simpletest browser the only game in town?
http://www.lastcraft.com/browser_documentation.php
Towards a new model for artists and labels
I think content syndication might be the application for artists and labels, especially labels, that brings it home. In order to go where all the fans are, we find ourselves spending more and more time updating pages on various social networks to get the word out about what our bands are doing. This isn't really skilled labour and should really be done exactly as you say--by entering the data once and exporting it to all the sites that previously had to be manually updated.
Or maybe the killer app is selling directly to fans. This has been a problem and although we've come up with several methods for selling downloads, the technical infrastructure of most supposedly turnkey solutions available as open source hasn't been up to the job. I think the trick to making this work for a label concurrently serving downloads to many users is interoperability with content delivery providers like Akamai. The performance hit from multiple 50MB+ downloads is enough to cause grief on many shared hosting providers, not to mention the increased chance of running into bandwidth caps.
As for the headache of warehousing, I don't really think it's much of one for most labels and nearly all artists. I would really like to see something like what the Kendra people are proposing--a delivery system that artists and labels can use to get their music up on digital retail sites. The big problem here is that iTunes want you to use their software and require technical certification if you want to deliver using anything but iTunes Producer. Technical certification isn't a huge problem for a company with skilled IT staff, but everyone else is going to be stuck using Producer. A solution we have used is to generate data that Producer thinks it has created, and I'm sure this can be done with Drupal. We've got a working exporter for Perl since this is also a necessary step to direct content delivery. Other big retailers like Amazon and Rhapsody have similar policies, but tend to be a bit less bureaucratic. They also don't have nearly 70% of the market share--but maybe that will change.
Technical issues aside, the retailer also has to be motivated to accept content from you and spend the time to negotiate an agreement with you. They'll also have to pay someone to answer your questions when problems arise. They're not hugely motivated to do this when they can practically force you to use a digital distributor ("aggregator") by refusing to sell your music. Going back to the technical issues, if they can be eliminated in the vast majority of cases by a uniform delivery system with some pretty good business rule validation, retailers might be able to be motivated to deal with small labels and single artists because a large part of their administrative overhead can be eliminated. Standard agreements with content providers could then eliminate most of the rest of the problem from the retailers' perspective.
Even better than developers writing individual exporters for each retailer, an open standard for content delivery could democratise digital music retail. I think a lot about getting power back into the hands of the producers because illegal downloader and aggregators have really been sticking it to independent labels like ours. Supplying music directly to fans means that you can sell music for prices that are much more appealing to fans while taking more revenue per sale. If big retailers disappear, then the music will still get to fans, but if artists aren't able to make a living off their work, then they will be forced to do other things for money and produce less.