FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – Kansas City, MO May 5th, 2022. datamazing inc, announces a public beta of Songtracks, for linking songs, videos, and photos to physical promotional items and merchandise.
In today’s world of music and video distribution, performing artists, musicians, producers, DJs, and many more are often lost in the mix of competing for views on these giant software platforms. While apple music and the Google play stores are great apps, unless you are a mega artist, the chances of generating sustainable revenue are virtually nil.
It’s been noted that these platforms are causing a contraction in the number of bands being formed, due to the uncertainty of the marketplace. What we hear on the street is that streaming services like Google Play, Spotify, and Apple Music are killing the market for smaller players who can’t compete on these platforms because they don’t have the large number of listeners, streaming their music, to compete with more established performers or heavily backed mega-artists.
You must ask whether streaming is beneficial to the Label or Recording artists. Of course, it’s great for consumers, but if labels and artists aren’t making any money, you lose independent and smaller artists and only Mega acts retain profitability. A case in point: Apple has let artists and labels know they will be paying 1 penny for each stream over their incredibly popular streaming Music app and service. This means a track must be streamed 1000 times for the artist and label to make $10. If you think that’s horrible, it’s about double what Spotify pays per stream. So, kudos to Apple. Spotify pays an average of about one-third to one-half penny per stream. Spotify has a larger listener base, so it tends to generate a larger number of streams.
When you look at how smaller performing acts up to mid-level performers generate revenue, it’s mostly from merchandise and ticketing sales to performances. These are the areas Songtracks are targeting. Songtracks enables the smaller to mid-sized artist to make more per stream by tying the music, photos and fan related content, music videos and eventually ticketing and other services directly to merchandise they sell directly to the fan. The price of that merchandise is fractional to what any customer pays in totality to the streaming service.
Let’s take-a-look at the financial facts.
According to Apple Inc, Apple Music costs from around 10.00 each month to 19.00 for a family plan. That service is sustained over years of charging $120 to $220 dollars per year per listener. The typical cost of a CD is a one-time charge of 5.99 to 12.99 but has no streaming function built in. That is, until now.
Songtracks is a software application built around the ability to make tracks available for streaming to a smart device much like scanning an item at a cash register in a music store. When attached to merchandise, Songtracks opens that revenue stream back up and pays the artists a kind of self-generated mechanical royalty so the merchandise sale can count towards the sale of the album. It’s like the late Prince giving away tickets to his show when you purchase his CD.
When the listener scans the barcode from the back of a cd, they can preview the tracks on the CD with Songtracks, but when they scan a Xerial Code, the user can register the tracks to their Songtracks account and gain access to the content by logging in with a username and password. Content can include audio, 2K video, band/artist photos, ticketing sales, fan info amounts many additional items.
Songtracks are built for use on smart devices and work on all popular iOS devices with support for WatchOS, iPadOS, TVOS and Web Player functionality in the works. Individuals, speakers, professors, individuals, and many more can even transfer their own audio and video recordings by using the online web tools to save content, while we manage the host streams, downloads, tracking, playback app and customer service for customers for a small monthly fee or as a service charge to any direct download purchases made from the app.
The user can choose to provide free streaming of the content or even charge a small fee set by the user for each track downloaded. This is an opportunity to finally take back the revenue stream for our platform users.
Once the item is licensed, “Merchandise Purchased” it will always belong to the holder until such time as the items license is transferred. If the item is lost, that license is still recorded as belonging to the purchaser. Songtracks are secured from mass replication using sophisticated software techniques to record that license to a user when streaming. Anytime an attempt takes and unlicensed copy of any recording or video, we can detect it.
You must be in possession of the item for the stream to initially work. You can create a playlist where you don’t have to rescan the Xerial Code to listen to the tracks.
For more info on Songtracks please visit https://datamazinginc.com/songtracks/
Open this link from your iOS smart phone: https://testflight.apple.com/join/oWx6b6RB
Requires the free Apple TestFlight app to download your invite. Here are the instructions according to Apple.com
Installing a beta iOS app via email or public link invitation
1. Install TestFlight on the iOS device that you’ll use for testing.
2. Open the Songtracks Public Link on your device.
3. When installing via email invitation, tap “View in TestFlight” or “Start testing” then tap “Install” or “Update” for the app you want to test.
4. When installing via public link, tap “Install” or “Update”
