Questions for Indistr.com

[Standard8]

Hope you don't mind being in the hotseat!

You pay 75% comission, or rather, you are paid a 25% commission by the artist when someone buys the song/album.

The cost of the bandwidth to download a 50 meg album is about how much? 5 cents?

What exactly is the 25% commission for? I know it's better than Itunes... but Itunes is the big boy and can charge whatever they want just due to market saturation.

What does Indistr bring to the table for 25% commission? Could you make plenty of money by taking only a 10% commission? How about a sliding scale? If an artist sells alot of downloads, say, 500, go from 25% to 10%, and if they sell 1000 downloads, move the commission down to 5%.

This would certainly attract more artists to use your site specifically and exclusively with that kind of potential revenue stream.

Thoughts?

[indistr]

Thanks for putting me in the "hot seat". As a matter of fact, our 25% isn't as glorious as it sounds. We don't make 25%, we split paypal fees with the artist, and after those take place, INDISTR ends up making between 15-20%.

You asked if we could raise the percentage and still be profitable? As of right now, being a new startup with 0 venture capital and very LITTLE funding, we have based our business model on 25%, to get numbers figured out for longevity (and it's still fair after you look at our competition). However, INDISTR has plans to bring the 75% payout to 80% this spring, so please hold tight.

Remember also, we have server fees, design costs money, programming costs money, etc.etc.etc.

We've thought about a sliding scale commission, but we're the only digital distributor who pays the artist within 10 seconds of the sale, yes INSTANT, so we think this is pretty fair, especially since this is a FREE service. INDISTR will never ask for monthly, annually, or subscription money, EVER, it's FREE!!! Think about it, you play a show, 100 people from the show go home and download 1 song, you've made $75! INSTANTLY! That's crazy, and beyond that example, 90% of INDISTR's sales are album sales, which is probably due to the name your own album pricing. Yes, as the artist, you set the price you'd like to sell the album for.

NO SITE OFFERS THIS!!!! We truly pride ourselves in being able to pay instant as an independent digital distribution site, the majority of these independent artists are working there tails off, and when they need gas money to get to the next gig, hopefully they've made some sales through the site to dip into their paypal account and fill-up the tank!

We offer a great embeddable player as well, for the artist to direct traffic to there profile page. If you go to an artists profile page on the site, you'll see it under "share song". We've also figured out the code to place this embeddable on Myspace and direct traffic to your profile page (which is not easy to do, since Myspace doesn't like directing traffic off of their site!)

Sorry for the long post, if anyone has any questions, please feel free to contact me Kevin(@)INDISTR[dot]com

Thanks for your interest and input!

[Standard8]

Have you and your team looked at a model where you break down the budget and the artist goal, do some division, find out what a minimum fee would have to be to break even, then charge something like a 5% commission for your profit? Alot of groups worth their salt would definately be willing to pay upwards of $100 if they knew they'd get 95% of their sales.

[Standard8]

Sell 500 albums on Itunes for $10, get $3500.

Sell 500 albums on Indistr for $10, get $4750.

A $100 fee isn't going to dissuade good artists from using your service if the numbers looked like that. It would also get rid of the vanity artists who don't sell, promote, or care if their stuff sells, because those artists cost you just as much as the ones who sell, as far as upload and storage space.

Just thinking outloud here.

[indistr]

I appreciate your thoughts out loud, and we will definitely consider them, however, we feel having to pay "fee's" is a turn off for a lot of people. Although this could work I assume if we did the uploading for the artists.

We have so many artists tell us how awesome of a model INDISTR is after we explain it to them, however they are too lazy to even sign up, that's why I think a model like Tunecore works so well, you pay them the $20/year, (or whatever the fee may be, I can't remember exactly), send them your CD, and it's done! Your music is on 7 major retail sites, and you won't have to pay again until the next year or the next album. Plus they just started a physical distribution program=awesome!

Obviously the next problem is that we don't have huge marketing budgets, which is why a lot people don't know we exist. That will hopefully change very soon though, we are going to SXSW in March and hope to have a good turnout. We will also be announcing some amazing new features/design by then.

[Standard8]

I'm not trying to bust your balls, I'm just asking questions. Sort of thinking how I'd do it, and you know opinions are like a$$holes...

[indistr]

No, it's all good, I don't mind answering questions. I work for INDISTR, it is my job to explain/talk/reason/discuss these types of things.

How's the weather in Athens? We just got a foot of snow and it's cold as Sh*T here!

Damn I miss Georgia.

[Standard8]

It's actually cold as hell here. ATL got a half inch of snow and shut down for the weekend. MLK would have been proud. [insert sarcasm here]

[thefineline]

From what I can see, your model is pretty similar to soundclick.com. Is this correct? I can see that you pay 75% while soundclick offers 70%. Also, you pay instantly rather than weekly. Still, soundclick has an enormous amount of traffic, which would more than offset the 5% difference per sale. They also allow sellers to set different prices for singles. What other advantages do you have?

[indistr]

Sorry for the delay thefineline!

To answer your question, I'm not all that familiar with soundclick's model, they are more of a social networking community and the only social networking sites I enjoy using are Virb.com and purevolume.com (for design and aesthetic reasoning).

INDISTR is a clean platform for which you can digitally sell your music while staying 100% in control, getting paid 75% of revenues, INSTANTLY!!!!

What do we give you?
We give you an amazing service that is clutter free, as well as a clean 30 second streaming embeddable player that you can put all over the internet to draw traffic to your INDISTR profile page. We also give you the freedom you deserve, because after all, you're the artist, we're just here to help you distribute and grow!!!

Thanks for the interest and please feel free to contact me if you have any questions:

Kevin@indistr.com