Music, Sound Effects, Tech News, and More — The AudioMicro Blog

Sit down on the couch, turn on your favorite sitcom or TV drama, CLOSE YOUR EYES, and listen. As you LISTEN (not watch) the episode, what do you hear? The continual music cues, stock music clip, production elements, and sound effects all throughout every show on every channel of the television. That’s just the TV example. On average, a show on network television spends $2.5 million per season per show on stock music and sound effects….simply put, it’s a $3 billion market opportunity in need of microstockitization.

AudioMicro just returned from the NAB Show in Las Vegas this past weekend.? Our research from the show confirms out expressed beliefs that the commercial stock photographer market is nearly identical to the commercial music licensing market and that the future growth of this industry lies in the real of micro stock / micro payment.? There are a handful of companies at the high end (Rights Managed) end licensing stock music to films and television for $1,000 or often much more, and there are a handful of nice royalty free CDs collections with thousands of stock music tracks and sound effects available on a per DC basis.? I sound like I’m describing the stock photography industry don’t I?? Although with slightly different customers.? This visit to NAB confirmed the notion that micro stock, a phenomenon that has taken control of the photo industry, will ultimately rise to the challenge and take on the high end licensors with it’s crowd sourced ingestion cycle and simple pricing model and end user licensing.? Time will tell…this industry will certainly be fun to watch over the next 5 to 10.

Posted in: NAB Show

We read about Sellaband raising $5 million in venture capital money today.? Quite an accomplishment.? They have a very unique business model for promoting artists whereby the “crowd” donates cash, actually $10 a peice in real cold hard cash, to the band of their preference and once the band has 5,000 donations, or $50,000 in donations, the cash is pooled together and the $50,000 is used to produce a limited run of an album.? We are impressed.? This is quite a profound and creative business model and it will take the pain out of capital raising begging at the doorsteps of record companies for a deal.? Sellaband’s business model is yet another example of crowd sourcing content (in this case, money, votes, and reviews) and using the power of the crowd to outperform that which would traditionally be accomplished by a smaller group of individuals, like a bunch of grumpy old record execs.? Right on….AudioMicro wishes Sellaband much continued success.

Tons of media outlets are reporting on MySpace’s joint venture with the big music distributors called “MySpace Music”. This is all fine and dandy and great PR spin. However, the real news is that although it’s nice that MySpace is playing nice in the sandbox with the big boys (Warner Brothers Music, EMI, Universal, BMI, Sony Music, etc.) by sending them a fat royalty check for all of the unauthorized music that folks have been listening to on user’s MySpace pages over the years, this does little, if anything, to help young, emerging artists garner a royalty check. AudioMicro has a better solution…post your content on AudioMicro.com and license it through our general commerical use license and we’ll send you a check (actually, it’s a Paypal) wire, every month. No need to go banging down the doors of the big record labels trying to get an audition or your demo played like the rest of the crowd. Once you can show them your songs have been licensed many times to willing content purchasers, you’ll be more likely to land that big deal you deserve. At least you’re not giving it away like a lot of sites – including MySpace prior to the point at which the aforementioned deal was signed.