'Love Music. Make Money.’ That’s the slogan behind
Audimated.com, a social platform that provides independent musicians and their fans the tools to share, discover, and monetize music. The Audimated model is simple enough – artists create products, fans promote those products and then fans earn commissions on sales. (You can view their marketing video at the end of this post.) The online community and marketplace is a free service. Artists can create profiles on the site so fans can discover their music and help spread the word to others. Artists can share their music and sell albums, singles, ringtones, concert tickets, or just about anything else they can think of that someone would shell out money for. The artist sets the price for everything they offer – and can even offer downloads of their music for free. Fans can create profiles as well and set up a personal “store” promoting their favorite artists. If other users buy an artist’s tunes, concert tickets, or memorabilia from a fan’s store, the artist and the fan can get paid. Artists get to choose whether or not they want to offer commission to the fans that promote their content though, and can set the commission rate to whatever they please. However the commission levels are set up in tiers – and commission is paid up to 5 tiers. It might sound confusing but here’s an example straight from the Audimated website. Let’s assume an artist has set a commission percentage of 10%. If fan 5 were referred by fan 4 who was referred by fan 3 who was referred by fan 2 who was referred by fan 1 then fan 4, 3, 2, and 1 would earn 10%, 5%, 2.5% and 1.25% respectively. In total the artist would pay out a total commission amount of 18.75%. Audimated themselves take a 10% cut of all sales on the site. I thought I’d run the numbers to see how much of a monetary advantage Audimated provides to artists. Assuming you sell a $0.99 single – Audimated takes $0.099 (which I assume they’d round up to $0.10), leaving you with roughly $0.89. If the single was sold to a tier 5 fan, you now have to pay roughly 18.75% in commission, which off of $0.99 single is equivalent to roughly $0.19 cents. That means the artist takes home roughly $0.70 – on a free account! Sounds like a good deal, especially considering that iTunes does not accept music from independent artists unless they go through a distributor, such as TuneCore. However all distributers will charge you a fee, while Audimated is completely free.
That pretty much covers the logistics of the operation – now for the website itself – it’s actually quite simple to navigate your way around. Audimated cuts out all that flashy design that clutters the page and keeps it simple. Sign-up was a breeze, taking me all of 2 minutes to accomplish and in addition to the main service they also offer an Audimated radio where you can hear tracks from artists who are registered as well as a blog that highlights featured artists, and articles that are can help any artist navigate their way in the music industry. My only complaint? Once you get to the blog, you have to look around for a link that’ll take you back to Audimated website. Audimated is still in the Beta version, having launched last summer, so we’ll just have to wait to see what the future holds for them as a company.
Here's the marketing video that also appears on the Audimated home page.
Save Independent Music: Audimated Tour from Audimated on Vimeo.
