Whilst too numerous to mention individually, rest assured each gets equal attention from us. Some of ... ]]> A few days overdue, but nonetheless finally ready for prime time! We’ve been putting together something quite special at Revolver Towers for a while now, and we can finally unveil what we’ve been so excited about: our artists’ music can now be sold in more than 300 of the most prominent download stores worldwide.
Reflecting the scope of our catalogue, our expanded store list has quite an unusual blend of stores, each carefully chosen as they represent significant stores for their respective territories.

Whilst too numerous to mention individually, rest assured each gets equal attention from us. Some of these stores go on to provide functionality for other stores or portals — the full list is longer than my arm! Here’s a summary of our newly updated list of digital stores:

• iTunes
• Amazon MP3
• Spotify
• We7
• Arvato Mobile
• 7Digital
• 24/7 Musicshop (>100 stores and operator platforms)
• Beatport (where appropriate)
• Beyond Oblivion
• Bleep (where appropriate)
• Buongiorno
• Boomkat
• Dada
• Deezer
• DJDownload / Juno Digital (where appropriate)
• Dream On Korea
• Eircom
• eMusic
• FNAC Music
• Gogoyoko
• HMV Digital
• HMV Canada
• iMusica
• iPlay
• Jamba!
• Jazz en Ligne (Digimus) (where appropriate)
• Loudtrax (Rock & Metal specialist store)
• MediaNet
• mFlow
• Mobilisten
• Mobivillage
• MOG
• MusicLoad
• SONY Qriosity / Music Unlimited
• Music Me
• Musiwave
• Napster & Rhapsody
• Net-Music (Media Markt Italy)
• Nokia Ovi Music Store
• One Italia
• Omnifone (who power many UK and international mobile stores)
• RDIO
• SFR (French mobile)
• Shazam
• Simfy
• Satellite
• Starzik
• Tesco Digital
• Thumbplay / iHeartRadio
• Trackitdown (where appropriate)
• TuneTribe
• VidZone (for 45+ international mobile and PC stores)
• VirginMega
• Vodafone Live (Germany)
• Valleyarm
• Walmart (Liquid)
• Wasabeat
• YouTube
• Zune Store

Through these partners, we also distribute to all major UK, American, European and Australasian mobile stores… And the best news? Existing Revolver Digital artists get all these additional stores immediately!

So, if you think your music passes muster (and you’re not scared of having it run the gauntlet of our A&R team for approval), consider us if you’re looking for a way to get your music out there. We look forward to hearing from you.

320kbps MP3s of Revolver Records, Heavy Metal Records and Revolver Digital artists, all in one convenient place, instantly downloadable… And for less than they cost on iTunes. Bargain or what?

Head over to Digital.RevolverRecords.com and start your virtual cratedigging sesh today!

Today, the major labels control the charts, but independence is slowly making itself felt. Radio stations still really only playlist tracks from major labels, but even with the passing of John Peen there are still some notable torchbearers for new, fresh and independent music (think Zane Lowe et al). Payola? Well, it’s still probably there to an ... ]]> Once upon a time, the major labels controlled the charts absolutely with an iron fist. Radio stations only playlisted tracks from major labels, payola was rife and pluggers knew the station controllers on a first name basis, they were in their offices so frequently.

Today, the major labels control the charts, but independence is slowly making itself felt. Radio stations still really only playlist tracks from major labels, but even with the passing of John Peen there are still some notable torchbearers for new, fresh and independent music (think Zane Lowe et al). Payola? Well, it’s still probably there to an extent, but everybody’s pursestrings have been tightened for a whle now. Pluggers still do the rounds but more artists are embracing the music machine and arranging their own marketing and promotion with the same people.

But what’s changed in twenty years?

To start with, ‘Specialist’ stations like Kerrang Radio (playlisted in the AM and daytime, DJ-chosen in the evenings) are still going strong, and the rise and rise of the Internet has given birth to scores of high-quality, free online radio stations. Online retail, driven by the likes of iTunes, Play, Amazon, Tesco, 7Digital and HMV, continues to take market share (almost 100% of UK single sales are digital, along with a good dollop of albums).

But yet, until this year, the one remaining safe haven for the pop industry – the Christmas Number 1 – had remained unspoilt (for the major labels) since 1998, when the Spice Girls were (within 5,000 sales) almost usurped by Chef’s Chocolate Salty Balls. From then onward with little exception, we witnessed manufactured pop song after manufactured pop song, with the SyCo Pop Factory doing its bit for novelty singles and two-week ‘hits’ (up to #1 in the first week of sales, then falling down past #40 within a month). But in November 2009, Jon Morter took the pulse of the music-loving nation and spearheaded an online campaign – to push Rage Against The Machine’s Killing In The Name to the Christmas Number 1 spot. This campaign proved marvellously successful, with RATM easily making the Number 1 spot over Joe X-Factor McElderry’s (cover) single by a margin of more than 50,000 sales.

This grassroots fan campaign, coordinated through Facebook, Twitter and word of mouth, also set a couple of remarkable precedents:

• Killing In The Name is the first UK Number 1 achieved purely from online sales
• the track also achieved the biggest download sales total in a first week ever in the UK charts (more than 500,000 by the cutoff point for that week’s chart’s sales)

How’s that for democracy in action? The pop machine, if only for a week, had a massive spanner thrown in the works. Not only did the X Factor content fail to secure a Number 1 position for its winner, a first since the trend began in 2005, it showed just how much can be done by a galvanised group of passionate fans to promote and support great music (even if it’s twelve years old!) when the means to do so are already in place. Without digital downloads of the track being available, this would have never been achievable.

If your faith in the industry has been shaken over the past few years, with the overall contraction of the market and smaller revenues, hopefully this should restore some faith for you. Getting your music up online on the major hitters is now easier than ever before, and it’s one of the core services we take pride in offering to quality artists. Additional services, like promotion, plugging and tour management, are increasingly accessible to independent artists. There’s still no such thing as a free lunch, but even on a meagre budget, a surprising amount can be organised and put into action.

Through all of this, the single most important aspect of any musician’s career is the fanbase. Today, it’s far simpler than ever before to directly connect with your fans. RATM4Xmas should have proven this beyond a shadow of a doubt, first with Morton ramping up his campaign through Facebook and then with Tom Morello tweeting directly from his Blackberry to the campaign’s supporters (and showing that support to the campaign right to the happy end). Negative comments from Cowell and McElderry were forwarded by campaign supporters and industry publications (NME took delight in reporting that McElderry, upon finally hearing the Rage track for the first time, denounced it as ‘dreadful’). Rival fans duked it out in cyberspace, sales figures and rumours were swapped and spread about and – in the meantime – a large amount of money (over £65,000) was raised for charity by the RATM4Xmas fans.

Upon winning, RATM confirmed that they would donate the majority of their earnings from sales to charity, and also hold a free concert in the UK in 2010 to say thank you – the ultimate payoff for the campaign’s supporters. Would any of this – could any of this – have ever happened before now, before the rise of social networking and all the other simple means of engaging with people en masse? Probably not, not even in the 90s. The web had very little to offer in terms of small-scale communication during the first few years of the 21st century, but instant messengers, MySpace, Friendster and others began an upward trend which has not slowed since.

But irrespective of how well people could have communicated or not – everybody managed with email and texting before AIM and MSN took hold – in the 90s, there was simply a lack of legal digital music venues available for customers. Napster was still reigning supreme, downloading was on the rise and habits were changing incredibly quickly. Portable music players were still very much a novelty.

Today? Digital sales are on an equal footing with the good old polycarbonate CD single. In fact, they have an edge – a band can record a single, have it professionally mastered, given to a record label or digital distributor and available for sale within a month, if they’re in enough of a hurry. A fe years ago, the Official Charts Company granted full permission to digital music to be included in the Top 40, provided that the shops selling the tracks pass on a de minimus “Dealer Price” to the label above a threshold which is set out in the OCC Rulebook. Currently, the Dealer Price is 40p per track for digital singles; this is where some of the confusion arose around the 29p Amazon deal during the RATM4Xmas campaign (the Dealer Price is not the retail price, showing that Amazon was selling this track, and the X Factor track, as a massive loss leader… Shrewd marketing from Amazon as always).

Thanks to some visionary organisations and small groups of intensely creative people, all of the tools an artist needs to be heard are available and free to use – with a small amount of money spent, a web site can be put up, MP3s shared, social networking profiles used to chat directly with fans. Today you can find Radio DJs on national stations busy on Twitter and Facebook, talking directly with listeners and bands before, during and after shows, and bands talking to their fanbases directly, bypassing The Label. At every step, it’s more engaging. Given the right push, and enough support, almost anything can be achieved.

We at Revolver like to think we offer that step up many bands need to find their feet online, navigating the complex maze that is international digital music retail. We handle the paperwork, the legalities and the massive amount of different requirements every digital music store insists upon… And with that headache out of the way, artists can set about doing what they actually love to do (writing music, playing gigs and building their fanbase) in the knowledge that we’re handling the tricky stuff for them.

It’s still a two way street, whatever the circumstances – if you have a fanbase, provided you connect with them and give them a good enough reason to support and promote your work, what you can achieve with very little promotion and marketing (compared to splashy, big budget campaigns) is nothing short of astounding. So next time you’re having doubts, just remember: the music industry’s not dead, it’s just sleeping. Time to help wake it up!

‘Why is this?’ you say. ‘How come you don’t listen to all the demos you receive?’ Well, for a couple of reasons… First: indie labels usually don’t have many staff members. Second: when we do get time to listen to some demos, it’s usually not much (twenty minutes here, ten minutes there)… Most demo appraisal happens in small bursts, just so we can work ... ]]> Time and time again, we receive boxes upon boxes of demos at Revolver Towers. A few of them are good, some not so much – but a lot of them are completely irrelevant, which makes us sad.

‘Why is this?’ you say. ‘How come you don’t listen to all the demos you receive?’ Well, for a couple of reasons… First: indie labels usually don’t have many staff members. Second: when we do get time to listen to some demos, it’s usually not much (twenty minutes here, ten minutes there)… Most demo appraisal happens in small bursts, just so we can work through the demo mountain a little bit!

We’re continually surprised at how we receive stuff which is clearly inappropriate for the angle of our labels… We sometimes receive Country & Western! In itself, C&W isn’t a bad thing, but (to be brutally honest) Revolver Records is probably not going to take much of an interest in this genre. This raises a few interesting points for artists on the prowl for label interest, and hopefully the following tips will help you save money and increase your effectiveness if you’re sending out demos.

So, here are twelve things (ten + two bonuses! you lucky people) to consider when putting together your demos.

1. OPTIMISM: call it your promo, not your demo! Make it sound as good as it possibly can (both when talking about it and the actual sound quality of the music) – “quick GarageBand recordings” or “rough demos with my laptop microphone” just won’t cut it if you’re serious on getting labels interested in listening to your songs more than once.
2. RELEVANCE: don’t send your music to a label which is never going to be interested. Miracles can happen, but they most likely won’t for you. Sending Hip-Hop to a Rock label, or Grindcore to a House label, will get you nowhere fast.
3. DON’T DUPLICATE: don’t send people the same thing twice! Revolver Towers has (for over 30 years) also been where Heavy Metal Records and Black Records call home. We sometimes get two, three or even four copies of a demo from bands who have clearly just scraped all of our labels’ details from a record label listings web site, printed labels off and stuck them onto envelopes.If two labels have the same address, it’s going to most likely be one desk (and if you’re unlucky, one bin too). Plus it’s a waste of your time and money!
4. THINK LIKE A LAZY LISTENER: if you’re sending out music via email, upload clips - don’t attach to emails. Make it as easy as possible for the recipient to listen without having to jump through hoops, as you’ll probably only get 30-45 seconds to impress whoever’s listening.Don’t ever attach MP3s to an email (or several emails), it just clogs up inboxes and music often doesn’t get listened to.
5. DON’T NAG: more is not better! If you’ve sent your music over and the recipient has acknowledged receipt, a polite email after a couple of weeks is fine to ask if they’ve had a chance to listen to your tracks. If they like it, they will reply. Don’t constantly email asking for feedback – and similarly, once you’ve submitted your material don’t ring the label every other day! Getting your music heard may be your top priority, but for most record labels keeping the lights on and their current artists happy are far more pressing concerns.Find the happy medium – only call people if they explicitly say you can, and they give you their contact details. The author speaks from experience; a band member ringing your personal mobile number (which, mysteriously, was never even given to him) on weekends to ask for feedback is severely unappreciated.
6. START SMALL, THINK BIG: split your promotion into rounds. Focus on the labels who you think you’ll have the most luck with, and devote more time and resources to luring them into your product. If you have no joy from the first round of PR, gradually widen your parameters and include more labels in your campaign.
7. MUSIC SANDWICH: mmm, delicious music. The best way to grab someone’s attention is to make it appealing to them (first visually, then musically). You could have the best demo EP in the world, but if it looks boring there will be no desire on the part of the guy at the music label to listen to it. Think of your music like the ingredients of a tasty sarnie: your onesheet/bio is the bread, the press shots/posters/stickers are the ham and chicken filling, and your music is the butter which glues everything together. (Oh, and the eye-catching packaging is the paper wrapper!) The best demos have a well made presskit along with the EP in a jewel case and full colour artwork… It’s the musical equivalent of presenting someone with a readymade sandwich, versus handing them a carrier bag (with the unprepared ingredients to make that tasty sandwich in it).While doing this costs more than just burning a CDR, printing off a one-page bio from Word in Times New Roman and stuffing it into a plain jiffy bag, it can make the difference between someone passing it over or that same someone picking it up, opening it and taking a listen. Also, if you have to budget more carefully, you can only afford to send out fewer copies – so it also helps you separate the wheat from the chaff in terms of potential record labels. (See tip 6)
8. TAKE THE INITIATIVE: don’t wait for a label to come along and do everything for you. Book yourself gigs, get touring, build up your repertoire. If you have some material which you think will be popular, maybe even self-finance an EP, record at local studios and sell it through an independent retailer / at gigs / through your own web site. This is infinitely easier to do today than it was even five years ago. Record labels *love* bands that have a proven track record and have shown that they can go and drum up some interest on their own, even before seeking label interest. Times have changed; where ten years ago some bands might be signed off the back of a demo EP, this happens less and less. A mark of maturity for a band would be to seek label support once they’ve taken these first steps themselves – the label can give them that boost which they need to take their music to the next level.
9. PATIENCE vs. PRAGMATISM: don’t lose heart, but know when to cut your losses. Sometimes, your demo may be halfway up in a pile of demos which fills a cardboard box – your demo might sit unopened for several months before saying hello to the CD player. If you’ve heard nothing back after a year, it’s either sitting at the bottom of another pile of demos, or it’s been passed over. Maybe try again, or send in an email to see if the music was ever listened to. If your packaging wasn’t the usual brown jiffy bag (or had some crazy designs on it), DESCRIBE the packaging! It might inspire whoever reads your email to go looking for it.
10. RETURN TO SENDER: just because a label doesn’t like your music doesn’t mean they still have to keep it. Some artists and bands send out demos with prepaid envelopes inside – although this costs money up front, it’s a great idea if you want to recycle some of your demos to send to other labels. If a label listens to your demo and doesn’t like it, it costs them nothing at all to return it, and once you’ve got it back you can send it out again. It beats having to put together another presskit and demo from your stockpile – and what’s not to like about that?
11. PRUNE: keep your mailshots organised. if you receive replies back from labels (or even your demo, if you included a prepaid envelope), don’t send it to them again when you do your next mailout. Be organised and keep a record of who you’ve sent copies to and you will save time and money in the long run (plus, it’s not hard to do with a simple mail merge in Word – or even just a list of contacts with a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ next to them).
12. BEST FOOT FORWARD: get everything synchronised. If you have a web site, a MySpace page, a Facebook Page… Link to every page on each one. If you don’t have a web site, get one! And pick a good domain name. Set up email addresses for the band members on your domain name (it looks that little bit more professional emailing from ‘stu@mygreatband.co.uk’ as opposed to ‘stu_loves_ponies_1987@hotmail.co.uk’). Spellcheck all your material! If you have an EPK, put it on your web site and link to it on your other social networking pages / web pages. Photos from fans taken at gigs, official press shots, audio clips, bios… All of those should be on your web site from day one. Maybe take it a little further, get some friends together and make a weird and wonderful music video for one of your tracks! It’s just another thing that can help set you apart from all the other bands out there, and if it’s entertaining you might just grab the attention of someone who’s interesting in taking your music further. (It’s often coincidence and random luck which yields most success, so you never know…)

Hopefully some of these tips will help you on your quest to rockband superstardom. Do you agree or disagree with any of the suggestions made above? Have you already tried any of them? Let us know how you got on!

Jack Straw, the Blackburn constituency MP, ... ]]> If you’ve not been keeping an eye on the news recently, you might have missed the announcement from EDC that they have decided to shut down their Blackburn manufacturing facility on the 31st of December this year. From then on, all of their manufacturing operations will be moved to EDC’s Hannover facilities. As one of the last remaining CD manufacturers with facilities actually located in the UK, this has come as sad news – not only for the Blackburn’s local economy and the company’s employees, but for the entire music industry in general.

Jack Straw, the Blackburn constituency MP, has already expressed his sadness at the closure, although this news may not have come as a total surprise to those working at the company – they had already handed over large contracts (such as their manufacturing deal with Universal Music Group) at the end of 2008.

Whilst the combination of a decline in CD sales and a faltering global economy will not have helped EDC’s fortunes, by contrast digital sales are steadily increasing. The last 12 months has seen a year-on-year increase of 25% – and in January, Reuters reported on the latest sales statistics from the IFPI. These show that digital sales account for more than 20% of global recorded music sales (in the USA, this figure is higher, at around 33%) – the market value of global digital sales is currently pegged at an astounding $3.7 billion.

Given the smaller costs to labels, artists and music fans, this should come as no surprise. However, it is crucially important not to neglect the continuing importance of releasing your music on CD and vinyl alongside all the various digital platforms.

Time for a little history… Like many other music labels, EDC has been one of Revolver’s key partners for some time now. Their Blackburn facilitiy has been providing manufacturing services to labels big and small for many years now, and through more than a few name changes. Here’s a quick list of their various owners through the past few decades:

• Philips & DuPont Optical: from 1982 – 1996
• Polygram Music Distribution: 1996 – 1998
• Universal Manufacturing & Logistics: 1998 – 2002
• Disctronics: 2002- 2 003
• Deluxe: 2003 – 2006
• EDC: 2006 – present day

Philips were the co-creators of the Compact Disc; EDC’s Blackburn facility has been a key player in the music industry since it began operations in the 1980s. To date, it has produced between 40 and 50 million CDs for labels as diverse as Deutsche Grammophon and Universal – as well as countless DVDs and LaserDiscs.

However, the closure of EDC’s Blackburn plant is not the death knell for the ‘physical retail’ sector of the music industry. If you’ve stepped into a music shop in the past five years or so, you will no doubt have noticed an increasing amount of vinyl (both 12″ and coveted limited edition 7″ releases). On the web, companies like Amazon, Juno, Play and CDWOW are still going strong. Arguably, there are more albums available on CD today than there has ever been before – and there is still a healthy demand for CDs from artists, labels and retailers. As an artist, you understand how important it is to give your fans what they want – your music, available everywhere

So for artists, why are digital downloads so important?

It’s important to understand that digital downloads are not just important to have; it’s far more important to have digital downloads on all the major platforms to reach as many music fans as possible – and it’s crucially important that you ‘do it right.’ What do we mean by this? Three things: strategy, coordination and expertise.

There are many companies who offer services to artists to help get their music onto iTunes, but many only do the bare minimum for your money. They can become quite expensive if you want to sell more than a handful of releases through them. Even worse, many of these companies did not even exist a few years ago – not what you could really call a ‘knowledgeable company’! By contrast, our Revolver Digital service has more than 30 years’ worth of knowledge and experience in the music industry (Revolver Records has been in business contiguously since 1978).

If your aim is to cover all the angles and reach as many of your music fans as possible, here is where our services come into their own. Working with us, you can formulate a solid strategy for releasing your music – from the first promos to the final product. As well as making your music available on all the popular digital platforms, we can also arrange other important services such as txt2buy (otherwise known as SMS shortcodes). Not only can you sell your music on iTunes, you could send a txt2buy code to your fans via MySpace which allowed them to download your latest single before it was released elsewhere.

Taking it one step further, you could even offer fans free exclusive bonus tracks when they come to one of your gigs – by printing the shortcode on their ticket (or announcing it during the gig between songs), it’s an amazingly personal way to offer something a bit special to your biggest fans.

Working with Revolver Digital doesn’t end there.

As well as simply releasing your music, we can coordinate with all the important people involved to make sure your music is out there for people to buy exactly when you want it to be. Want to simultaneously release your latest single on CD and iTunes, and make sure that they both appear at exactly the same time? It’s sorted.

But what about this – imagine you had a gig coming up, and you didn’t want to have to carry 200 copies of your CD (they’re very heavy!) as well as all your gear, your instruments, and your merchandise. By offering your fans a ‘combo’ package at your gig, you can increase sales and solve a problem at the same time. Your fans can buy a copy of your music by SMS shortcode, and get the CD posted to them… And included in the price, they can also download a digital copy, included in the price, to listen to on their phone or audio player before the CD arrives!

You could sell this package at a slight premium, and your fans get instant satisfaction and the best of both worlds – digital audio files to play straight away, and the very highest quality version on a CD, to either add to their collection or share with their friends.

Even if you don’t already have your music on CD, we can arrange that. (We can even produce your artwork!) Getting your music pressed to CD can become very expensive for an independent artist – the paperwork alone involved with getting a CD produced has been known to reduce some to quivering wrecks. However, Revolver has almost 700 CD & vinyl releases under our belts – we know how to ‘do it right’. You might think arranging these kinds of unusual packages would be a nightmare to coordinate without expert help… And you’d be right – but this is where our wide range of expertise comes in.

With Revolver Digital, it’s as simple as asking… We sort it all out for you, so you can focus on making great music.

Revolver Digital provides a range of all inclusive, ‘no strings attached’ solutions for small labels and independent artists alike. Where some other companies charge you for the package and then charge you again for the extras (including some necessities such as ISRCs or barcodes), all this comes as standard with our services. But perhaps more importantly, you get the opportunity to develop your musical career in partnership with one of the country’s longest-running independent music labels – something money can’t buy.

So, if you want to take your music to the next level, get in touch today. You can email us, call us… or even send us a letter. We look forward to hearing from you!

New interim trade delivery figures from the IFPI show that of the top five music territories, the UK was the best performer digitally with sales worth $115.8m (£74.52m) already (they stood at $169.5m [£109.02m] at the end of 2007).

Thus, although physical sales slumped 10% – the UK and US markets combined accounted for a 60% loss of physical sales globally – in the same period, the digital growth prevented a total collapse.

Digital sales now account ... ]]> A 45% increase in digital sales has helped slow the decline in the UK music market to just 4% in the first half of the year.

New interim trade delivery figures from the IFPI show that of the top five music territories, the UK was the best performer digitally with sales worth $115.8m (£74.52m) already (they stood at $169.5m [£109.02m] at the end of 2007).

Thus, although physical sales slumped 10% – the UK and US markets combined accounted for a 60% loss of physical sales globally – in the same period, the digital growth prevented a total collapse.

Digital sales now account for 16% of the market in the UK, slightly lower than the 20% global average.

IFPI director of market research Gabriela Lopes explains that the UK has performed better than the overall global market, which saw a 12% decline in physical sales in the first half. This equates with the 12% fall over the whole of 2007, indicating the decline in physical sales is pretty stable. “The first half of the year is a pretty good indicator of what will happen over the whole year,” she says.

Combined with the 25% increase in digital sales globally (up significantly from just 15% at end of 2007), the global market has shrunk overall by 5% over the first six months of 2008. But that is actually a decent result in the current economic market because at the end of last year the rate of decline in physical and digital sales combined was 8%.