Widescreen mode, a previously unknown band to me, has been quoted in a Kauppalehti article on their record sales online. They have been on the official downloads list for 15 weeks (src) with their single Everlasting Bomb. Kauppalehti has written that the 15 week sales add up to about 100 000 purchased downloads. That’s a very good amount in Finland.
Now, to the problem itself: the sales don’t generate a lot of revenues for the band itself. This is nothing new and something I have been preaching about for a long time. The problem in my opinion is the business model. It may have worked in the age, when record shops reigned and bands needed distribution deals to break it big time – not to forget a proper amount of radio play.
However, in the age of the internet, this model does not work anymore – at least from the artist’s perspective. In my opinion, there are too many useless middlemen. Widescreen mode has created a phenomenon online with the help of their Mikseri page (an online music community supporting amateur bands), their IRC-gallery community and lots more. With regard to a group of supporters, they have quite a solid fan base online already – they are reaching to them directly in terms of communication, why not in sales?
Currently Widescreen mode sells their music through online music stores, which sell the song for around 1‚Ǩ. Teosto, record labels, the government and the music store all take bigger proportions for themselves than the band itself (my guess, but I’ve done some work in this sector and the figures are quite strong). Needless to say, the business model is very distorted. Radiohead did what bands should have been doing for a long time already, they sold their new album online directly from their own website and went even further with it – they let the users decide on the price!
It takes guts to work on the edge and take the risks (and eventually reap the rewards). However, in some cases it simply makes sense to forget and dump the old ways of doing business and go ahead with new ideas and methods. Because, when you stick to the safe ways of doing business you’re taking a risk of staying behind and dying slowly.
(Seth Godin has a good post on why industries don’t break the conventions of doing business and stick to the old safe ways of doing business.)