Revolver Digital, from Revolver Records » The Industry Insider

iTunes, iCloud, iTunes Match… cloudy, with a chance of windfalls?

Christopher (Revolver Digital Team) — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 19:20:16 +0000

or, Problems for labels with iTunes Match?

On Monday the 6^th of June, Apple’s keynote at their World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC 2011) had many positive things to announce: OSX Lion, with its $29.99 price tag, its array of new and improved features and cloud download to every customer’s compatible Mac after purchase (ala Steam). At the same time iOS version 5 for mobile devices (the beta of which has already been jailbroken less than 24 hours after release), and their revamped mobileMe cloud service – dubbed iCloud – finally arrives on the scene to add another layer of integration to the mac user’s ecosystem.

Of all the hundreds of new ‘features’ introduced, most are unremarkable or arguably not very innovative (at least when using some of the things Apple have devised in the past decade as a benchmark!). If anything, they are just an amalgamation of features previously available elsewhere, except now in an Apple-mandated, fully synchronised, pain-free fashion. All you need to enjoy? An Apple device.

However, the real announcement (the one occupying most of the acres of print and online coverage, and the one also keeping the independent music sector on tenterhooks) has been Apple’s music service. Precious little was revealed prior to the WWDC keynote (in typical Apple fashion), but here is the précis for those who didn’t catch the keynote live:

One of the new cloud-based features has been dubbed “iTunes in the Cloud”
- Service offers customers ability to buy once, download many times (up to 10)
- Automatic synchronisation and permanent storage of their purchases online is included for no extra cost, all controlled from their account
- Customers can manually sync over prior purchases to their other devices
- If customer buys a track on their iPhone, it will also appear on their other devices.
The Complete My Album feature is implemented into the Cloud service, with the same features as before.
- Seamless cloud functionality (apparently), again tracks sync to all devices

But the “One More Thing” was the real kicker… iTunes Match.

Debating the effectiveness of the industry’s current antipiracy stance

Christopher (Revolver Digital Team) — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 15:48:13 +0000

After reading this article from Broadcast Magazine, it got us thinking:

Don’t demonise piracy, says IT Crowd creator

12 August, 2010 | By Ellie Broughton

Graham Linehan, the writer behind comedy The IT Crowd, has said the entertainment industry is gambling with its future by “ignoring or criminalising” the issue of piracy. Speaking at a debate on piracy last night, Linehan said the current response to online pirates was unrealistic and aggressive.

“It seems a bit like the big corporations are saying, ‘put down the gun or I’ll stab you’,” he said. “The discussion at the moment is not particularly reasoned.”

The television sector mirrors the music sector in many regards – sharing and unlicensed distribution of telly is almost as rampant as music, what limits its spread is more the unwieldy size of the resulting video files more than anything else (which is where we in the music industry have more of an uphill struggle with as music’s far more squeezable than video!)

We’ve traditionally taken a fairly lenient stance towards issuing takedowns, going instead after those originally uploading our music to sharing sites – largely because it’s a pointless exercise to spend all of your waking hours chasing pirates, unless you have VERY deep pockets and sufficient human resources to dedicate to solely pursuing the culprits. We do issue takedowns to the sharing sites when we find our artists’ music available without permission, but pursuing individual filesharers is like cutting the head off a Hydra.

By contrast, sites like Youtube – although they have music by our artists uploaded without our permission – serve to be very useful as promotional tools and aid exposure to new audiences, so it can be a balancing act deciding how heavy-handed one should be when enforcing copyright infringement. From our standpoint, it’s refreshing to see that other large programme producers can step back and highlight that neither side is totally blameless in this ongoing saga of legit vs pirated… Imagine what it would’ve been like if the music industry had cottoned on Napster upon its launch and then rolled out a pay service model on top of the existing system? They could have cleaned up!

We are fortunate that most of our customers are still music fans in the truest sense of the term – they buy CDs or the downloads, they respect the musicians for their hard work and investment and they also respect the role the label has in the process, a role which has dramatically changed over the past decade. We value those customers immensely and always seek to reward them for their honesty however we can If you have a suggestion for a competition we can run, or the kind of things you would like to see us offering (interviews with bands, backstage features, exclusive podcasts featuring an artist’s Top 10 tracks etc) then hit us up on Twitter at either @revolverdigital, @heavymetalrecs or @revolverrecords!

The Industry Insider: What’s in an ISRC?

Christopher (Revolver Digital Team) — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 02:36:25 +0000

Although the latest BPI statistics show that an all-time record of 98.6% of all UK single sales were digital (over 117 million!), the digital world has not fully divorced itself from its history in the real world. If you’re an artist selling your music online, you still need the essentials - EAN13 barcode, catalogue number and (most importantly) an ISRC for each track, or you simply cannot have your tracks on any of the major online stores. (As a label with 30 years’ operating experience and almost a thousand albums under our belt, this irony’s not lost on us!)

However, unless you work with them on a daily basis, ISRCs can look confusing. How are they made up? What do they mean - and what purpose do they serve? In the first of our Industry Insider articles, Revolver explains it all – read on to find out.

ISRCs, or International Standard Recording Codes, are actually defined as a worldwide standard as ISO 3901. Think of them like the music industry’s version of the ISBN system. There’s several mandatory elements, and a five character ‘free text’ area which the label can define.

Here’s a sample ISRC: GB-AB3-09-429-01

… and here’s what it means:

Country code (as per the two-digit ISO country codes; for the UK, it’s GB)
Three letter alphanumeric label code (e.g. AB3)
Year of release (two digits, e.g. 09)
Five characters which the original label defines. Some labels have complex ways of generating the last five digits, but we prefer to use the last three digits of the release’s catalogue number, and the number of the track in question (e.g. 42901)

ISRCs are unique to each track and can’t be reused. Occasionally clashes occur for whatever reason, and when they do you must reassign a new ISRC. The code’s used as a unique tracking device for helping to calculate royalties, tracking radio play and keeping tabs on if a track is included in a compilation or rereleased on another format (for example, released digitally, then later released on CD and 7″). If a track is remixed, it must have a new ISRC assigned to it – likewise, if the track length changes (for example, if a track’s made into a radio edit) then it must also receive a new ISRC. You can imagine how quickly some releases acquire lots of ISRCs!

You might sometimes see ISRCs written with hyphens. This is purely for readability – some online retailers like iTunes won’t accept them if they have hyphens in (the release will simply fail validation if they’re left in) but this isn’t the same for everyone.

Keeping a detailed list of all relevant metadata is one of the most crucial aspects of digital distribution as you manage catalogue across all the many hundreds of online stores, but if you’re a Revolver Digital artist, we handle all that tricky stuff – leaving you to focus on making music. If you’d like to find out more, browse through the rest of our site or get in touch with us.

Image credit: 37Hz on Flickr.