Audiam

I distribute my music through Tunecore, the online digital distribution company that was founded by Jeff Price and Peter Wells. Last year Price and Wells were relived of their duties and summarily dismissed. I was surprised to hear about this move. I know that conflicts can happen with a publicly held company that might find the company's founder/s looking for work, but these guys seemed to have set a new standard for independent music services. Unfortunately, after all this time, the reason for their dismissal remains a mystery.

On June 12th 2013 , Jeff Price and Peter Wells announced their return to the web with an all new company called Audiam. The goal of Audiam is to give independent artists the means to collect money from having their videos played on YouTube. Price and Wells estimate that half of the 25 billion videos posted to YouTube are bringing in about 1.3 billion in advertising dollars a year. Audiam will provide a system to get ad dollars for the other 12.5 billion videos.

The service is currently in beta and is only providing access to those living outside of the US, but Price and Wells expect it to go live sometime early this summer. There's no up front cost to use Audiam, just a flat 25% administration fee. Artists can upload as many songs as they want. Audiam will find videos that use those artists songs and authorize YouTube to place ads on them, and then administer the artists' share.

Audiam will also supply information to YouTube that will allow them to auto - generate buy links to iTunes, Amazon, and Google Play, for placement underneath each video.

Sounds to me as if Price and Wells may be on to something. Up until now most independent artists have not had access to money from views of their videos on YouTube. Clearly, the amount of money that will reach most users of Audiam will probably not be quite as much as major label artists, but at least it will be money that these artist deserve but weren't able to get. I think, and this is just my opinion, that this is definitely something worth looking into.