They're stealing our music and robbing my life...

They're stealing our music and robbing my life...

Well we found another site that is illegally giving away our music without our permission and with zero compensation to us. I found out when a friend of mine who is rather new to being violated in this way contacted me, asking what she could do about her band's music being on this site, wondering if I knew anything about them. The first thing I did when I got to the site was search for Worldwide Groove Corporation.  This is what showed up...

Stop! THIEF!! This is worse than piracy.

There are certain aspects of being an indie artist that I can't think about too much or I'll end up with an ulcer. Today I'm going to share one of these issues with you, simply because I don't think people realize it happens. But it does. And as someone who is not under the umbrella of a record label, and would need to pay out of pocket for attorneys, we end up just taking it up the rear and trying to move on.

I was promoting our new instrumental release today when I got a reminder of a long standing violation of intellectual property which is still coming back to bite me. What am I talking about? Well, I'll tell you what I'm NOT talking about...

How to keep your songs from all sounding the same.

How to keep your songs from all sounding the same.

What if you have to write several uniquely different songs in a short period of time? How do you keep them from all sounding too similar? How do you create contrast from one song to the next? Ellen Tift talks about various songwriting techniques to keep things interesting.

Does Tidal actually pay more than Spotify to artists for digital distribution?

Tidal is the new digital music platform on the scene, owned by a hand full of A list music artists, and their claim was that since it was artist owned, they were going to pay artist better than the other platforms. Due to the turn around time on receiving payments for music streams, I'm just now seeing the numbers on what the actual payout rate is.  First, let's see what's been posted about Tidal...

When others give away what we worked so hard on...

One of the most frustrating and disheartening parts of releasing music in today's digital music marketplace is when perfect strangers take it upon themselves to freely give away the music that we have worked so hard on, and paid so much to create, thus discouraging the few remaining buyers from actually properly purchasing our work.  After releasing our first record in 2007, one day I set up a Google alert so that any time a website was found with "Worldwide Groove Corporation" or "Chillodesiac" in the page contents, we would get an email with a link.  Little did I know that within the next week I would get dozens of email alerts directing me to blogs where people [who make a habit of doing this regularly] had uploaded our album artwork and all of the music into downloadable files so people could just help themselves to our work without even connecting with or compensating us.

How much is music worth? See our royalty statement.

If you found out that you had gotten over 72K plays in a 3 month period for music you had released 7 years ago, you'd think that was pretty good, right? 

I'm going to do this from time to time just so people can see what streaming music pays the songwriters.  Here is one section of our first quarter royalty statement from 2014, it covers 3 months.  Based on this section of the statement, 72,098 plays paid $4.82*. That is .00006685 cents PER PLAY.