February 2001

Surf City, Music Websites in Review.

Quack Marketeers

DuckMusic.com, By Brian Stillman

Signed musicians have many advantages over the rest of us mere mortals. They have bigger recording budgets, more fans to support a tour, hotter women, stronger drugs and free alcohol. But I digress.

The main benefit enjoyed by artists lucky enough to be picked up by a halfway decent label is a strong marketing and promotion department. Consisting of ad reps, distribution managers and public relation workers, the marketing and promotion group gets a bands music and message to the masses, and helps get CDs into stores. They take out ads for shows in local magazine and newspapers, and send announcements to journalists, fans and retail stores, alerting everyone to the groups latest activities. In short, they are the engine that allows a band to go places.

Of course, it takes a lot of money to grease the engines cogs. Most of us can barely clean underwear and decent beer, let alone a publicist. So were stuck handing out flyers before a show, and pestering local record stores, who carry discs on "consignment" (a polite euphemism for youll never see a dime from any sales we actually make of your shiny little coasters"). The result? Outside of a few family member and close friends, very few people know about your band, your music or you.

Which is why DuckMusic.com is such a worthwhile web site. At first glance, it comes across as just another place for indie artists to try to sell their tunes. The site provides all sorts of e-commerce solutions, including secure online credit-card transactions, shipping options and digital music samples.

Look deeper, though, and you’ll see a sophisticated marketing and promotions tool, where site members (i.e. you and me) can, for a small fee, create their own state-of-the-art, updateable, self-maintained, e-commerce web sites.

Specifically, each artist’s site provides all the musician needs to plug his or her own act. Members are allowed to sell one CD title online and post two audio samples so that surfers can try before they buy. In addition, DuckMusic provides space for news items, bios, photos and tour lists. Want to maintain a mailing list? DuckMusic makes it simple, compiling a database of all your visitors’ emails. You can even set up a bulletin board so that your fans – and your band – can make their thoughts known online.

The cost for all this marketing goodness? An annual fee of $80 – a rather low price, especially if you have three or four bandmates to help fit the bill. (A recent promotional offer at the site cut the fee in half for newbies.) Should you have additional CD titles to sell, DuckMusic will let you offer them for sale for a small additional fee.

Working with DuckMusic is straightforward. Visitors can search for bands by name or genre and purchase CDs online via secure server. The site keeps copies of your CD in stock, so shipping usually takes place within 48 hours. What’s more, unlike many record store owners who sometimes "neglect" to pay artists for consigned CDs that are sold, DuckMusic keeps accurate records of purchases and pays artists accordingly.

For the musician who wants to take advantage of various technological innovations, DuckMusic also provides services for the creation of enhanced CDs. This means that you – yes you! – can have a CD that, when placed in a computer CD player, bombards viewers with music videos, web links, animation – whatever your heart desires. It’s the 21st century, baby. Welcome to it.

As noted above, none of this comes free. In addition to the $80 annual fee, DuckMusic pockets 25 percent of the sales (or a minimum of $3.50 per CD). If that seems a little steep, consider that you probably would sell fewer CDs through your own independent web site. Whatever costs may be associated with the service; DuckMusic makes up for them with the prospect of volume sales.

DuckMusic had a clear, easy-to-navigate layout. Bands are organized by category – Rock, Alternative, Metal, Pop, Jazz, Classical, Hip-Hop and "Other" –and, in a nod to all the rap-rock/classical/world music bands out there, each act can list itself in up to three genres. This increases your visibility and the likelihood that random buyers will encounter your product. As a promotional bonus, DuckMusic also periodically features bands on the site’s main page.

All-in-all, this is a very well-executed site. It would be nicer to see some broader music categories; stuffing techno, punk and reggae under the umbrella "Other" is a little awkward. In this day in age, when genre lines blur more and more every time a kid picks up his or hers first instrument, it’s sort of silly to stick to such an un-hip, bricks-and-mortar labeling philosophy.

But it’s a minor complaint, given the sheer number of features available through DuckMusic. And at a cost of just $80 a year, it provides the marketing tools previously limited to the big boys at a price that’s comfortable for the rest of us.

-- -- by By Brian Stillman (Guitar World )