Great deal for someone who wants to put their musci on RBN!!

[HeXcoda]

Its not just about how many songs you sell on RBN,its about get your band exposed. If they like what they hear,people will go out and buy their CD's,go to their concerts,buy merchandise,etc... yeah its a risk,but thats all part of the business. You have to spend money to make money.

Actually, in the digital world, you don't really have to spend money to make money. The whole point of digital distribution is near zero cost to produce and distribute materials. The supply side of supply and demand is easy enough to get together -- which means that the demand doesn't have to be incredibly high to still make some money. Long tail, yo.

So, let's say if someone wanted to roll their own, they could get Reaper and an XNA subscription -- maxing out around $150, if I recall, which is a pittance compared to the "discount" price of $1000. After that, any sales you make on RBN are all yours. Be a smash hit or be something someone occasionally picks up, either way, you'll very likely trump your initial investment and the rest is gravy.

Say you DON'T want to roll your own. Tag with RA or a similar company, again, zero up front, and gravy all the way home. RA are the ones taking the risk, but it's balanced -- if they get enough songs in the works, the ones that sell subsidize the ones that don't, and again, the up front cost is minimal for them (time investment, mostly, not much cash investment).

This is not a good deal, period. It's old media thinking, that you have to blow massive amounts of money on an ad budget in order to get anywhere.

[Mr. Tate]

I understand what you're saying, but look at the title of this thread. "Great deal for someone who wants to put their music on RBN" (fixed typo). That is a blatant falsehood. This is not a great deal for bands, especially unsigned ones.

I don't care what it takes the business to break even, that's their problem, not mine. Whatever business model they need to come up with to do that is up to them. My perspective is from the band's point-of-view, and from there, this price point is ridiculous.

And that's absolutely right. I wasn't discussing that. I was pointing out that for the whole RBN project to work, at least outside of the homemade charts domain, treating the 3,000-4,000 copies threshold as some kind of finish line is dangerous. 4,000 copies ca. per song is, and I don't know if people are realizing this, not a huge number, it's in fact some kind of minimum target to shoot for for the business as a whole. And as you will agree, for RBN to become the interactive music platform we all want it to be, we need professional doing the charts, for a number of reasons I'm sure you already know.

Again, it was just an analysis on something you said, not a discussion on an offer that is simply not good.

[ethicalpaul]

Yeah let's think about that before we get up in arms, shall we?

$1000 means that, assuming your song is put up on RBN for $1, you'd have to sell 3334 copies of your track on RBN to even break even. And that's their limited-time discounted offer??

At their "regular price" of $2500, you would have to sell 8334 copies on RBN to break even. Are any unsigned bands actually expecting to achieve that? Many of the tracks that HMX themselves have released for regular DLC haven't even sold that well.

In my opinion, they're out of their freakin' gourd trying to charge that much.

I agree with everything you wrote there, David. But let's think a little more from a different direction. That company might not be alone in being out of their gourd:

You accurately state the difficulty of selling enough copies to recoup a $1000 investment. So let's apply that same logic to the difficulty of making a reasonable income as an authoring company.

An authoring company has to hire someone to chart a song (I'm simplifying down to a single person, but many of them split up the tasks--but I think the economics of it are similar). That person is going to work for let's say 60 hours total. This will include all playtest adjustments, web submissions, responding to playtesters, discussions with the band regarding decisions, getting any additional audio if necessary, everything.

Let's decide to pay this talented individual $8.33 per hour. Seems kind of low but hey, he likes music. That's $500. Now we, the company owners, have to pay all of our expenses and try to scrape out a profit.

So on day one in the store, we are in the hole $500 (of course, at this time, the store is not open, so things are even worse than I'm presenting). The song starts selling on the store. It sells 1000 copies the first month (let's say January).

But M$ doesn't pay you at the end of the first month. They pay quarterly. So no money yet.

In February, there are more songs in the store, but your song is still getting sales--let's say 500 for fun.

In March it sells another 300. Admittedly these are totally made up numbers. If you don't like them, I'll take suggestions. But they seem plausible.

Three months have gone by. I haven't seen any money yet. I had to pay my contracted author $500, that doesn't help the bank account.

Now M$ is getting ready to pay, but they let me make changes to my bank account information until April 15, so I know they aren't going to transfer any earlier than that. In fact, they say payments can take up to 45 days after the end of the quarter! And I have a feeling they are going to use each of those 45 days.

So OK it's now May 15th and I finally get money from M$! (1000 + 500 + 300) * $1 * 30% = $540. So after paying my author I have $40 after having waited for FIVE MONTHS. I can at least pay for my xbox live Gold account for that year, hurray!

But oh crap I forgot about the band! In all this calculating I got careless!! I have to give them 1/2 of the $540! So now I still don't have enough money to pay my author--I'm $230 short!

It's going to be tough out there I think, especially at the beginning. It would sure be nice to be wrong though.

PS: I know it's possible that I could have cut a deal with my authors so they aren't paid a fixed amount, but instead, they are paid a percentage of the income. But that just lets me share my pain a little with them. Let's say they do a 50/50 split. So the charter has to wait 5 months to get $135 for 60 hours of work. And I have to wait 5 months to get $135 to run my company and pay myself. Even if I had 10 songs just like this one in the store the income is very tiny.

[thjimmy]

...someone ... could get Reaper and an XNA subscription -- maxing out around $150, ... a pittance compared to ... $1000.

After that, any sales you make on RBN are all yours.

...you'll very likely trump your initial investment and the rest is gravy.

I see this arguement all the time. And, while it seems stable, it's a little more complicated.

OP said it takes 80-100 hours to produce a purchaseable track.

What is your 80-100 hours worth?

Are you doing this in your spare time?

Could you be working at a job making more than $10 an hour with the same time?

Could you be writting new songs, promoting your band, or doing some other unique-to-you activity?

The bottom line is, if you have nothing better to do, or you are passionate about the process, then you should author your own tracks.

If you could be doing something more productive, pay someone else to do the heavy-lifting.

[kingtonyx]

yeah, I would not pay that price

[thirdmortal]

I agree with everything you wrote there, David. But let's think a little more from a different direction. That company might not be alone in being out of their gourd:

I agree the companies are not trying to rip people off. they seem like a reasonable rate for the work but the point David is making is that why would anyone put that kind of investment down for questionable returns?

Sure, if you are a known band who could project a definite amount of sales then the $1000 upfront is a good idea, since you will collect 100% of the profits down the road (which you would hope would be more than $1000). But if you are unknown, you have no idea what kind of sales you will get. How the charting company makes money is of no concern to the band.

[ethicalpaul]

Yeah I read his post saying that he was strictly talking about it from the band's perspective after I posted. He's right, the band should get whatever deal it can.

But if I'm right in my concern, pretty soon there won't be anyone for the band to call, because the phones will be disconnected.

[Quazifuji]

I think the biggest issue here is that Rock Band Network is currently an unknown entity. It hasn't launched yet, so there are no figures on what sort of profits a band can expect from it.

Part of the reason that the split-the-profits payment method is so popular is because it removes the risk for the band. They can sign up with someone like Rhythm Authors knowing that, even if their song's a complete flop, they haven't lost anything. For a lot of bands, that's a big deal. It also puts pressure on the company charting the songs to promote them and ensure that they sell well, since their profits are directly tied to song sales.

Once RBN comes out, things may change. Maybe it'll turn out an unsigned band selling several thousands of songs is actually a regular occurrence and $1000 or even $2500 is well worth it for the profits/exposure it gets, or maybe ethicalpaul will be right, and it'll turn out that the current pricing models won't be able to support the charting companies that have come up.

But right now, no one knows. And with no idea how many sales they'll get, most bands would much rather take no risks with something like RhythmAuthors than invest $1000 on something with statistics saying what kind of profits they'll get.

[Neversoftsux09]

I think the biggest issue here is that Rock Band Network is currently an unknown entity. It hasn't launched yet, so there are no figures on what sort of profits a band can expect from it.

You dont think that HMX has told the bands that already have their songs on their game and others they have coming about this??? I guarantee they told them about this. That would be dumb on there part if they didnt cuz they get a cut for every song that goes on there.

[davidshek]

I agree with everything you wrote there, David. But let's think a little more from a different direction. That company might not be alone in being out of their gourd:

You accurately state the difficulty of selling enough copies to recoup a $1000 investment. So let's apply that same logic to the difficulty of making a reasonable income as an authoring company.

Yeah, I totally understand the point of view of the company that's asking that price. What I'm saying is that their asking price is ridiculous, and they can't possibly expect any unsigned band to be willing to front that much money with questionable returns. $1000? An unsigned band can record an entire album in a budget studio for that much money. They can buy most of a PA with that kinda cash.

Unsigned bands are lucky if they have $500 to buy T-shirts and other merchandise to sell at gigs, let alone a grand to spend on something like this. We're thankful if we even make enough money playing a show to pay for the gas it takes to get there and get home again, and maybe feed the 5 members of the band throughout that day.

If their business model really is, "We must make $1000 or $2500 from the band for our business to succeed", then they really need to rethink their business model.