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A Good Business To Get Into?


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an excerpt from a Business 2.0 article about new business opportunities.

 

Digital Artists Agency

 

ELEVATOR PITCH: Riding the online-music wave, DAA would be an entirely new breed of talent agent for musicians.

 

INITIAL CAPITAL: $20,000

 

TARGET MARKET: By 2008 the music download business will be worth an estimated $3 billion annually, according to Forrester Research. Agents take 15 to 20 percent of an artist's sales.

 

BUSINESS MODEL: DAA researches, markets, and develops talent online. It receives commissions from online sales of music, tickets, and merchandise.

 

DETAILS: The promise of online music is that more bands can become profitable because the marketing costs are lower. But with so many digital music stores, streaming radio channels, illegal peer-to-peer networks, and other music services coming online, how do you keep up? No one has broken a monster act onlineyet.

That's where the agency comes in. Backed by its core research, DAA will help labels and artists understand the online food chain, which starts with a song getting plenty of free play and proceeds to actual music sales. Trends in who's listening to what and which sites are hot are fluid and poorly understood. AOL Music, for instance, has 18 million listeners a month; get in the rotation there and it's a short hop to actually selling your single through iTunes.

 

DAA constantly monitors and interprets the data and develops a plan for promoting an act. Either working with the digital music stores or through its own guerrilla marketing efforts, the agency will generate online buzz for its clients by trying to get their album on, say, the iTunes homepage or the list of top hits at Musicmatch Radio. DAA makes money from the resulting music sales, ticket sales, and new areas of revenue like getting unknown acts preloadedat the factoryon MP3 players. Combined, iTunes-like services and sales of MP3 players already amount to a $670 million industry.

 

HURDLES: The window of opportunity could close fast. Once traditional Hollywood agents who already enjoy relationships with established artistswake up, it'll be hard to compete.

 

WHAT THE PROS SAY: Burnham: "I think the business is there. It's a service you could launch with sweat equity up front. You wouldn't even need VC money."

 

Les Vadasz, former head, Intel Capital: "There's a good opportunity here to start this as a one-man shop."

 

Ryan Floyd, Storm Ventures: "There are no capital costs. It is all your relationships and ability to convince individual artists to go with you. You could promote artists at a fraction of the cost. iTunes and Rhapsody would love that idea."

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I'm sure everyone hopes online music will become successful, but people have been trying for years and it hasnt really taken off yet.

 

But I havent really paid any attention to iTunes. How is that doing?

"Meat is the only thing you need beside beer! Big hunks of meat and BEER!!...Lots of freakin' BEER."

"Hey, I'm not Jesus Christ, I can't turn water into wine. The best I can do is turn beer into urine." Zakk Wylde

 

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lets see it work.. get in fast... right. short hop to sales on I tunes ?? oh my...

large numbers? oh golly. sounds to me like: "YOU CAN'T WIN IF YOU DON'T PLAY!"

there are a ton of great and fantastic bands and artists out there that will rack up by PAYING MONEY to get on AOL and get their songs up and INTO ROTATION uh huh.. cause its a short hop to what> you got it now...

Frank Ranklin and the Ranktones

 

WARP SPEED ONLY STREAM

FRANKIE RANKLIN (Stanky Franks) <<<

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Sorry man, I don't have my Cajun/Appalachian/Jamaican to English translator handy so I can't respond to that, but one of the points of the article IS that the big players haven't figured how to deal with this segment of the music business yet, so someone who did understand the technology, and the artists could make a lot of money.
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