Birth of "e-label" as a buzzword

I came away from the three day Immedia AMBC 2005 conference recently thinking to myself, “perhaps the answer is to skip the whole manufacturing and retail distribution malarkey, and just focus on producing and marketing music in online-only deals with artists?”

My idea would be to try to encourage independent artists who are unlikely to break even on an indie release in Australia to just release their work online thru Littoral Records. They can skip the offline altogether, or sign the rights for offline over to another label - I’m cool with that.

I still have numbers to crunch, but my hunch is that it might be significantly more profitable, albeit on much smaller volumes. And you might have to kiss your ARIA Top 20 entry goodbye as a result (hahaha).

Anyway, it’s such a good idea that Warner Music has pinched it already - how do ya like that, fer cryin’ out loud?

So maybe I’m crazy… crazy like a fox…

follow-up: DropLoad

...of course, there's a competitor to yousendit.com (on the internet, there's alllllways a competitor!). www.dropload.com is very similar, although it requires you to create an account before you upload your first file. And they advertise "up to 100Mb" which is not strictly identical to yousendit's "1GB" but is probably effectively the same thing.

Yousendit.com - where's the revenue?

We've all experienced the problem of how to share large files over the internet. Don't be coy, you know what I'm talking about: the 5Mb files your email server refuses to forward; the video of a Super Bowl ad you thought was hilarious, the MP3s of the album you love, the 5 megapixel photo albums from your holiday, or the PSDs your agency needs you to review before close of business today.

Turns out there's now an answer, which goes by the name of www.yousendit.com. It's quite straightforward - upload a file of up to 1GB to yousendit.com's servers, and you'll get a URL which you can email to a friend. The file will stay online for seven days, during which time your friend can download it at their leisure (and on Australian DSL, it may take up to seven days to download 1GB!)

Send the URL in an email to a friend, or get a version that you can add to your blog or website. You can even use a secure https server for those... ahem... saucy video previews and confidential company documents you're leaking.

It's all terribly convenient, and for the time-being, entirely free. My gut says when yousendit.com finally has to derive some revenue from this, they'll try to charge uploaders per Gb, and then freak when usage plummets. Then they might try an ad-supported model, and learn (as Yahoo! and Google will probably never admit) that you can't yet pay for raw HD storage with banner ads. And then they'll either get acquired by a major player looking for a new source of registered users, or flame-out. So my advice would be to start using yousendit.com now, before the model changes and/or the company goes toes-up.