Finding the Rhythm

Those who’ve seen my weekly Top 25 Dance Chart are probably aware that I place “buy” links in the rightmost column for every entry I can. I do this for several reasons:

• To support the artists by making it easy to buy their material.
• As a service to listeners so they can know immediately that a track is available for sale, and can go buy it on-the-spot.
• To make a few pennies each time somebody buys something.

To that third point, believe me, I make about enough money each month to buy a snack at Taco Bell (but I think of you each time I do, of course).

Until today, I’ve been linking to iTunes and Beatport. These referral and commission systems are called “affiliate programs” in the web business, and for high-visibility, high-traffic web sites, they can be a real money maker for the site referring the traffic, and for the stores being referred to.

In any event, I’ve pulled the plug on Beatport, and replaced it with links to Amazon’s MP3 download store. Like Beatport, they sell MP3 files, free of DRM (copy protection), that can be loaded onto any portable music player, or played by virtually anything that can play digital music at all (cell phones, PCs, whatever).

But unlike Beatport, Amazon doesn’t play favorites with record labels, they don’t care about an affiliate’s sales volumes, and they don’t force customers to use a slick Flash-based web interface that looks sexy but otherwise inhibits usability. Beatport also seems to over-emphasize certain genres of dance and electronic, which is fine I suppose, but they honestly just don’t carry a lot of the stuff I play anyway.

Many people have told me they don’t like iTunes; others don’t seem to care. I have nothing against iTunes per se; I have an iPod (three of them, actually), so I shop there too from time to time. iTunes Plus certainly removes the DRM aspect from the discussion, but they still sell AAC files, not MP3s. And given that MP3 files will play on just about anything, I will probably start emphasizing Amazon links going forward.

In the end, I don’t really care much whether you click the links on my chart or not, or whether you prefer Amazon, or iTunes, or Masterbeat, or Beatport. The real thing for me is that music consumers support the music and the artists they love by buying their music instead of stealing it. Most musical artists make their money through live performances, not records, and that’s been true since before the music industry starting falling apart. But for dance artists, live performance opportunities are few, leaving music sales as the main revenue source. Hopefully you’ll ponder that a bit the next time you’re wanting the lastest dance track, and keep an already very small “industry” alive.

Wes