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April 2006
Interview with Scott Stambaugh of Independent Artists Company IAC
We're pleased to have Scott Stambaugh of IAC here for an interview for Studio Reviews Magazine.
Many of you know him in online forums as the sardonic and witty "Al", and in the world of OMD as the ever-prolific, chart-topping "Father Time". Scott Stambaugh is the COO and Head of Programming at Independent Artists Company MDS (Music Distribution Site).
I interviewed Father Time in-depth in 2000, Virtual Rock Star: An Interview with Father Time (part 1) and (part 2).
And here we are in 2006 with Scott to get the lowdown on IAC and its developments, and the future of online music distribution (OMD).
Dan Richards: Scott, to kick things off: What is IAC? And could you take us back to the inception of IAC. When and how it got started, and your involvement with it?
IAC Scott Stambaugh: Well, Independent Artists Company (IAC) is based on the concept that indie artists don't get the kind of opportunities they deserve in the larger music business, all the avenues to the mainstream are blocked. The only route open for independents to get true exposure is to buy into the industry themselves and bridge the gap by force, so that's what we're doing. The music site is only one element of IAC, more will be unfolding in the course of 2006-2007.
The seeds of IAC began in summer of 2003 when I was contacted by Dave Walton who is my partner and the CEO of the company. IAC was in planning for around a year before the site was launched. During that year, we embarked upon what was surely the most comprehensive talent search in the history of the internet. There were so many outlets for music by this point after the demise of mp3.com, we listened to in the tens of thousands of acts and worked very hard to bring the best of them to Independent Artists Company. Consequently we became known first and foremost for quality music. A lot of the phenomenal artists at IAC were found in obscure nooks and crannies on the web, honestly it was shocking, the depth of talent and songwriting one could find if they really took the time to cover all that ground. Sometime about the midway point of that search it became undisputedly clear that the best of the indies were not just a little bit better than the mainstream acts we'd all be forcefed for years, but as a collective were a great new era of music in themselves. I can tell you I've heard more songs that I truly love on IAC in the last year than I heard in the 15 years prior in mainstream radio rotations and on the Billboard charts. It is our mission at IAC to do what we can to help the cream rise to the top, and this group of artists, to put it bluntly, appear to be pretty unstoppable..
Dave and I have a background of work with indies. He founded another music site that is still in operation today (he sold his majority ownership to focus on a more important project - IAC), and is considered one of the innovators of internet radio, having started the popular shoutcast feed/chat format that is all over the net today. I had done some work with a previous site in the area of artist relations and also founded an artist rights organization. We met back in 2000 when Dave was one of the first people in online music who supported Father Time's music, having his site sponsor some internet concerts of mine, which were also sort of groundbreaking. He's a visionary of sorts, and over time it was obvious we are kindred spirits, our strengths compliment each other perfectly. Most of the IAC staff wear many hats, we work very hard on site development and some of the things coming very soon will shock the world, I believe. Smile Another thing we have that most sites don't is a fully staffed Journalism dept. headed by Shauna Skye, who also worked on Dave's previous site, and Sandy Zieger is sort of our ace-in-the-hole who contributes in various ways, recently brought Rachel Fuller and Pete Townshend to IAC for instance. Also Lana Crowley helps with artist relations and wears several hats as well.
gonxo-x: what is the best way to go about Advertising for my debut release of my album by using my IAC page?
IAC Scott: Ways to use IAC to promote your CD, let's see..
Well one good way to get your music out there is the use of our stations. Anybody who has a page can create stations of their favorite music at IAC. The idea is to create a nice playlist based on some theme or another and usually the artist includes a few of his or her own songs as well. If you're an active station owner, the kind who updates regularly and promotes your station, our avid listener base will find it and all the artists on your station will benefit. Consequently artists who you include and station owners you link to (we have an elaborate link system) will find you also, and if they like your music, the number of stations you're on will multiply fast. It's almost unbelievable how active the station community is at IAC. Sure other sites have had things like this but we're proud to say that we believe our stations are not only the most user friendly and look the coolest Smile, but have aspects totally unique to OMDs like an editable tagboard on each station page which really helps the networking aspect.
IAC artists Rachel Fuller and Pete Townshend I guess I should mention also that you can of course do a big feature of your CD in the upper html section of your page. IAC Prime members can sell their CDs and superhifi downloads in the IAC shopping cart for a subscription fee. Our philosophy for the merchants aspect of IAC is that we have it as a convenience for the artist, not as a big profit source like other sites who charge a substantial fee for each product you want to sell or the corporate download sales sites that take a big chunk from the artist off the top. At IAC you get to set your own price on download sales and you could literally sell downloads for 30 songs and sell your whole lifelong catalog of CDs in your IAC shopping cart. You could also sell your CD in the form of a DMD, which is IAC's innovative digital delivery concept. The DMD Ultrapage allows you to package with your music all kinds of extras that allow you to really give your fans an up-close and personal vantage point. and, well, there's a huge new feature coming to IAC within the next few weeks (it's almost imminent) that addresses more than anything we've done up to this point how to connect with listeners. I'm hoping that before this interview is over I can announce it because it's got to be the biggest moment in the history of our site, at this juncture. I just can't wait to talk about it. Smile Dan: Currently, an artist page at IAC allows for three free song uploads of MP3's. Should we expect this to last indefinitely? Or is there a limited timeframe on that? And then there is the paid subscriptions for artists. What the rates? And what would an artist expect to get for their subscription. I only see a way to pay with Paypal. Will IAC take straight credit card transactions in the future? IAC Scott: Yes the purely credit card transactions are on the way, but the IAC offices have made special arrangements in cases of those who don't want to use paypal at the present time. Fwiw, we do have a system now where you can use your credit card but it goes thru paypal. The 3 free songs, there's been no discussion whatsoever of that being a temporary situation. We get some truly great artists coming in for free pages and we're about quality songs so I expect that policy will be longterm. ok, IAC Prime. Costs $29.95/6 months or $49.95/year. What that includes is having up to 30 songs on your page, and an IAC shopping cart that allows you to sell download singles, CDs by consignment and DMDs(you receive 85% of all sales). It also includes a photo gallery, and a membership to the IAIA (International Academy of Independent Artists). There are more benefits that are being added within the next 3 months or so (creation and sale of harddisc CD product, a ramped up stat package, and deluxe page templates from our sister site paperscape.us. by the way we're glad to have you on the site! Tubedriver: The streaming sounds pretty good in my humble opinion. Just wondered if there's any technical details you can share about what we're listening to (bit rate etc.)? IAC Scott: Our streaming is done by a special flash player that uses some added enhancements for the compressed files, a bit of auditory compensation. I might also add that we allow uploading of mp3s in all bitrates so a pretty fair amount of artists on the site use mp3s of 256-320 kbps which despite what some say sound a lot better than 128s imo. James J: A couple of questions: 1. What are your thoughts on community and collaboration? I feel like that was a key to the late 60's scene (Woodstock, The Byrds and Bob Dylan, Richard Thompson playing on Nick Drake's records, etc.). There are a couple of collaboration websites out there, but my experience with them hasn't been very positive (they seemed like a limited group of insiders that weren't interested in expanding). 2. What features does IAC have that help the deserving obscure get more recognition? It seems like the setup of a lot of the other download sites make it easy for the already visible artists to stay that way and very difficult for obscure artists to get any notice (the rich get richer...). IAC Scott: Community and collaboration - well we have an active forum at IAC with a review section that a lot of people seem to be getting into. As far as collabs go, well, on a personal note I just released a DMD called With a Little Help from my Peeps where the theme is.. 17 songs collaborating with various indies. It's much better than my first CD so I guess I'm as into collabs as anybody. As far as IAC goes, we do have something called the Collaboration Zone on our Artist Help Station page, which is a moving scroll of collab ads. I expect we'll be doing something more soon, we haven't started a new forum for awhile and that might go over, now that our forums are getting pretty lively.
As for your second question, what do we do to help the deserving obscure, well, we are about the deserving obscure. In many cases we found them and brought them to IAC in the first place. Anyway to further elaborate, our main chart is the KIAC Big 50, which is presented in the same kind of format as a heavy rotation radio chart, and is compiled by the programming dept. so it doesn't involve artists' song streaming count whatsoever. Our Hitline on the front page is also entirely generated from the programming dept. We work very hard at getting great new artists somewhere prominent on the site so that our listener base can find them. I mentioned earlier our journalism dept and you can find a series of interviews with some of the top IAC artists in our Spotlight Magazine. Recently Michelle Rene, a featured country artist at IAC, won the the Colgate Country Showdown in Nashville TN and won a check for $100,000 and the title of the "Best New Country Act in the Nation". Michelle credited IAC for helping her with the judges cause marketability was one of the criteria and Michelle was the first pure country artist we had crossover into our Top 5 on KIAC back in early 2005. Anyway we are so proud of her! Smile I have to add though, that in addition to that part of IAC, we do have play charts as well where artists can promote themselves for greater exposure so we do try to provide the best of both worlds. Kilgore Trout: How is IAC different/ better than some of the other sites? Do you get a lot of outside/non musician traffic, or is it mainly all artists? Also, was wondering what you thought about all of the illegal downloading of music, and how it can affect indie artists? IAC Scott: How is IAC different from some of the other sites, well, for one, we're in the later stages of purchasing a mid-market FM station, which assuming the music goes over as we expect, should be just the first in a network of stations in cities across the US. Smile We have mention of this on the site, but it's kind of funny, the online indies are so jaded by now, few believe this kind of thing til they actually see it come to fruition, so we don't talk about it as much as we'd like to. But not only that. The site, standalone, we feel is superior to any other out there because of the functionality provided, the appearance and customisability, and then of course there's the content which is probably most responsible for the rapid growth of the listener base. Which ties into the next question. A great deal of our station owners are fans, not artists. We were lucky enough to turn on some really enthusiastic listeners in the early going who aggressively spread the word about the music at IAC. In fact, pure listeners are the only way a site can grow as popular as IAC has become in such a short time. btw, we seem to be extra popular in Europe these days. I do know some sites where the situation is mostly just artists listening to other artists though, so I know what you're talking about there. Where is it headed ? Well digital music sales continue to grow. Much of it is thru big corporations which take a good chunk from the artists which is another reason to stick to indie driven sites like IAC. CD sales I think will still have a big piece of the market for a long time to come though, too many people who simply don't bother with the internet or who will just buy CDs and stay with what they understand.. Illegal downloading of music. Well Napster helped to slow down the momentum of what mp3.com was about. Seems to me that these kind of things, whenever they figure out a way to stop them, there's always another way around it. The politics of the various music organizations usually seem confusing and conflicting to me. There will always be people who find a way to steal songs. But most of the people in my part of the online world aren't about that, many of the ones finding ways to get protected music for free are in it as some kind of illegal business and many end up getting in trouble for it. Back to where it's all headed, well, I believe that there's a revolution about to happen, music wise. The narrow corporate radio formats have simply not allowed the true originals to flourish, cause the suits are only "discovering" acts that sound similar to the last moneymaker act that broke for them. As the great indie artists become more a part of the fabric, there will be less tolerance for the lamestream mainstream. This year's Grammy Awards being a big flop is just one of the first shoes to drop. It's getting too obvious that the best new songwriters are online, and not on the playlists of huge radio conglomerates ! Andrew Plumb: Scott, any plans to podcast the FM station content? IAC Scott: yes, we are going to have podcasts, and an online simulcast of the FM broadcast, but they won't be the same thing. There's a lot of interest in podcasts, and we are prepared to accomodate that. Bazz: How many artists do you think are signing up a month,on average? Also, are there artists selling their songs on IAC that are moving a fair amount of them, like maybe more than they expected? I logged on the other day and I think I saw 4600 people on the site at that time. Pretty impressive. Scott: Yeah our traffic is going up in leaps and bounds, it's actually gone up over 30% in the last month alone. And when the next new feature is ready (very close now), that should give us another big boost for sure. Not sure what the average is, but I know we've had weeks where we added around 500 new artists. We just had to add another server because of the growth. In regards to sales, I know one easy listening artist who's selling DMDs every time I turn around, and we also have an act that's sold massive amounts of digital singles. We only take a very small handling fee so we're getting more artists who set up shopping carts. I don't feel like that aspect has really reached its full potential yet but we have ways on tap to bring a lot more listeners to the party. Some of the things that we're working on should be enormous for the site, and for indie music in general. Dan: On the topic of community, are there some developments in the works to build more of a sense of community at IAC? IAC Scott: Well the station rankings are based on plays and page hits. We don't really have a chart per se for that but they are in order of how busy they are. Probably a fairly quick rise cause you have good places to promote it here and at the Planet. The statistics for your songs are on the upper left column of your admin page. It also lists where your songs are on the site chart overall. Actually we do have an upgrade of those coming fairly soon, we're going to have a pretty elaborate stat package for prime members, for one, also some additional features for basic page artists. The total listeners online number has been moved to the upper right corner of the page. Mac users will find that the site looks good on the newest versions, however we do plan to go back and deal with some compatibility issues with older systems and browsers once the site building we're doing tapers off some. A lot of people use the provided tagboards to converse and such. Actually what you mentioned about the tagboards not listing all the posts, that has actually been addressed on the artist pages, there is a scroll bar that appears once the posts fill up the space. Just needs to be added to the station system, those tagboards were just put on there fairly recently. The bbs we've sort of gone for quality rather than quantity, have screened applicants so we don't have a troll element like you find at most of the large music sites. But actually community development is at the core of the newest feature coming to IAC, the one I mentioned previously in this interview. I'm going to give the first official word of it here. There's still a few last details to complete but it's in pretty good working order right now. The big new IAC feature is called "the pipeline". These are special personal networking pages, what it is is the natural evolution of what's going on at My Space and elsewhere. Yes, we are taking on Fox. :) Months in development, we feel we outdid ourselves, the product kind of speaks for itself. Along with several features never seen on these kinds of pages before, one huge difference is, our site integrates these pages with the ability to make stations. Also, we made a deliberate effort to move the personal page genre into a more intelligent place, as we feel that My Space's biggest significance to the web community is to dummy down cyberspace with their "friendship" game. And of course another plus side is that the infrastructure of ours is solid so it won't have service issues all the time like My Space has had for months. Ours is more of a dedicated blog system also. Here's a first look at the pipeline. We are very proud to add 'the pipeline' as part of our site. Listeners are already signing up fairly briskly even though we haven't done any publicity on it yet. We recommend all artists and listeners get on the pipeline and set up their networking homebase at the Indie Capital of the World. Dan: Alrighy. Thanks for the interview and information about IAC, Scott. Consider me hooked. IAC Scott: IACmusic.com is for people who are into the music, we are committed to indies for the long haul and are honored to have so many exceptional songwriters together in one place.
More about Independent Artists Company at www.iacmusic.com
Talk about this interview at Studio Forums. [Topic includes complete, unedited interviews.]
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