You’d do better paying $20 or $30 per month to buy a website under your own independent domain and sell them off your site and look for other “free sites” to link it to; than to pay $10 per month for limited uploads and they still won’t sell!

OK so firstly please note that VibeDeck isn’t a distributor, it’s a direct-to-fan tool.
And secondly if you’re an artist or label shifting a minimum of $70 of product a month then using our service has very obvious and far reaching benefits, it’s simple math really.
Other competing services like Topspin (15% of your sales revenue + change a minimum of $10p/m + download credit costs) and
BandCamp (15% of sales + $10p/m for all features + download credit costs) will cost you considerably more to use.
We totally understand that if you’re an artist starting out then using the platform isn’t probably going to be cost effective over an annual period. However the plans are month on month and therefore it’d be sensible to subscribe and use the app as and when you need to (say when you launch an EP or Album or trying to do focused promotion), while maximising your earning potential.

There’s no reason any musician would really want this service. At this point they might as well go to other distributors, because they accept more than just PayPal.

I do understand the reasoning for having your own platform on your own site, but for $10 a month with LIMITED downloads? No way.

If Will wants to make this change profitable and keep musicians paying on the site then turn the site into both a CD sales and gig marketing site where clientele looking to hire musicians to perform for certain events can log onto the site and choose a performing pianist,singer or band for hire. Now the musician can generate some capital to invest back onto the site with the potential of increased sales in track downloads or full CD sales.

Just get back to myspace promote yourself and instead of offering digital download try to sell physical cd or other fomat.

f.. you vibedeck.

p.s.: we choose how to live and how to die. this is the end of vibedeck.

I’m a 67 year old recovering cancer patient on a fixed income. I probably wouldn’t be that much concerned about my future in staying on Vibedeck if I was successful in getting more frequent paid contracts to perform. I’m already paying another site for gig performance on a monthly basis as it is for that.
My income is as such where I can’t do both Gigsalad.com and Vibedeck too.
It would be great if Vibedeck could offer musicians
a site page that musicians could market their live performance services to “booking clientele” as well as to have their music for sale or streaming for an affordable monthly fee.
This way the monthly recurring fee would be well worth the investment because now your talking about a site that has a “work potential”.
Don’t get me wrong! I love this site and don’t want to be forced to give it up! I’m tweeting and googling this site 24/7

“typical media consumer doesn’t want to pay anything for their music at all” I’m not sure this is true. Sure, a vast amount of people steal music obviously but it all depends on what you’re offering as an artist and how you promote.

I understand what you are saying with regard to your page hot having “financially generated anything” but again, I can only say that i can’t see this as VibeDeck’s fault as there are artists (major and independent) on the platform that sell an insane amount.

Comparing SoundCloud and VibeDeck is somewhat unjustified. SC have been around for 6+ years, they have millions of users and with that comes a huge amount of visibility via their spread and search, it’s also more of a social platform.

Same thing with MySpace. It’s been around since 2003 and I’m sure you’ve had hits and comments from all around the world, but again, it’s a social platform not an commerce transaction tool so comparison is unjustified.

Some good suggestions but ones that simply won’t work. How do you pay for the hosting and support costs of thousands of artists who upload their data and sell nothing and who have never contribute a cent?

Thanks again for your constructive comments.

Cheers,

Wil

I don’t think anyone is seriously suggesting that you are ‘ripping artists off’ and I understand the difficulties in monetising an internet service.

The problem is, as I have already mentioned, that the typical media consumer doesn’t want to pay anything for their music at all!. They will stream and download for free, but almost any obstacle will deter them from ‘paying’ in any form – even a ‘download for an e-mail address’ – anything where they have to identify themselves, no matter how securely.

For your subscribed artists, it is not a case of them ‘only valuing your platform because it is free’. It is also their economics. For example, I would have been prepared in principal to pay for the extra of ’60 second sample previews’ rather than the full track, but in the time I have been subscribed to VibeDeck, (about fifteen months) it hasn’t financially generated anything – despite being linked to and propagated on my official FaceBook Music page and other websites. Indeed, it has only generated about 120 free streaming plays and a handful of ‘likes’!

By comparison, my SoundCloud profile, opened at the same time as VibeDeck, has had four times the number of plays and that without being promoted in the same way – so it has a degree of virality of its own.

But, and get this – my original MySpace Profile ( http://www.myspace.com/clivecowan ) has received over 41,000 hits, nearly 17,000 plays of my tracks (free streaming – you can add about 2,000+ to the reported number) and resulted in both public and private comments from every continent in the World!

If you really do want to ‘support your artists with ‘even more focus’, then how about this:-
• Keep the ‘free account’ option
• Scrub the ‘download for tweets, likes & e-mail option
• Allow the 60 second preview for free
• Find a way to introduce virality
• THEN charge a modest percentage of revenue

That way you will monetise any download or merchandise but only if the artist makes a sale.

I respectfully suggest that if you proceed to make VibeDeck paid subscription only, that many artists will leave it and, unless you have a large number of ‘big brand named artists’, you may actually hasten VibeDeck’s demise. I do hope not.

I wish you well and thanks for VibeDeck to date.

Kind Regards, Clive

Thanks,

We wanted to give a deeper explanation in the hope that you may fully understand our reasoning behind this change.

VibeDeck is a startup, not some massive corporate company owned by Newscorp. We have a very small but dedicated team. Startups like this cost a lot to run. Servers, services, developers, hosting and bandwidth are regrettably not free. We’re not trying to rip off artists, far from it. I am an active gigging musician myself and we built this platform to help artists promote and sell in an effective and affordable way.

We had hoped that providing a free service with optional paid extras would provide a strong enough revenue stream to support the platform, but there are tens of thousands of artists with huge amounts of data being hosted who have never contributed a cent.

If we moved to a % cut of sales, as you all think we should, the platform would not last. A large percentage of transactions are promotional (for likes or tweets) and these social transactions make the revenue % cut model totally redundant. Adding adverts to pages isn’t an option either for a number of obvious reasons.

So, we’re making this switch so that we can support our artists with even more focus. We’re dedicated to fully support our users who value the platform and what it can do for them, not just because it’s free.

Thanks again for all the support over the last 1.5 years.

Wil