Gimmesound: Good For Your Band?

Mumbai electro-rock act Medusa has jumped on the Gimmesound bandwagon and offered their two SoundPad tracks (‘I Become I’, ‘Hilltop’) up for free download, along with ‘Clone’ and ‘Bird Catcher’. The band joins other Indian acts like Junkyard Groove and Workshop who’ve put up their music on the service in the hope of turning free downloads into revenue.

Wait, what? Free downloads into money? Yeah.

Gimmesound, started in April 2009, claims to “pay artists for every download out of ad revenue, with a percentage going to a cause of your choice”. While the idea seems a little idealistic, several bands have joined the website in the hope of making some/any money out of MP3 downloads. In fact, recently Magic Bullet (hardcore label – boysetsfire, Frodus, etc) recently entered into a partnership with the website to distribute their music for free.

But how exactly does the service work? According to the website

Every month we take half our net revenue and divide it by the total number of downloads that month. This gives us an amount to pay you for each download of your songs for that month.

For example: let’s say that half our net revenue is $1,000 in a given month, and there were 2,000 songs downloaded during that month. For that month, you would get paid $0.50 for each download of a song that you own the rights to. So, if one of your songs was downloaded 20 times and another of your songs was downloaded 50 times you would get $35.00 (70 downloads total times $0.50 per download). Of course, real numbers will not necessarily be anything like this example.

Every month the amount we pay per download may differ, but every artist gets paid the exact same amount per download. In the example above, every artist got paid $0.50 per download. Let’s say that in the next month, half of our net revenue is $1,500 but the total downloads remained the same (2,000 downloads). For this month, each artist gets paid $0.75 per download.

While we cannot guarantee to pay you an exact amount per download each month. We do guarantee that we will split our net revenue 50/50 with all the artists every month.

What’s this ‘net revenue’?

Net Revenue Defined:
We define net revenue as the amount of advertising and sponsorship revenue paid to gimmesound.com, less payments to salespeople and agencies who sell for us. That’s it. We do not include any overhead, production costs, research & development, programming, hosting, A&R, marketing, PR — nothing else comes out of net revenue. All the other costs associated with running this business and providing this service come out of our half.

The visible advertising on the website currently is a top banner taken by J&R (the killer New York gadget warehouse) and a bottom panel that displays Google ads. There’s no ‘Net Revenue Meter’ visible, so how much the website makes via said ‘advertising and sponsorship’ is anyone’s guess. And with more acts joining the website every day, the share of the 50% pie is getting smaller.

Still, for Indian bands currently making no money on CD sales and non-existent MP3 retail, the promise of the ideal is yet greater than zero. So as an Indian indie act, should you offer your songs up on the site for free download? To be entirely honest, if the cost of recording your songs is an insignificant sum, go right ahead. You’re probably too lazy to record/release an album on CD, or have no money to do so. Your MySpace is stagnating among a million other profiles and you aren’t on Twitter yet. The hope of making money is better than no money. Right?

If you have, however, spent a lot of time and effort getting your music recorded, and consider spending time and effort being a proactive Indian indie act that has a website, MySpace, Twitter, Facebook, blogs regularly, plays shows frequently, has an EPK, et al (we’re still looking), then you probably could do without Gimmesound. Or just wait for a bit, and ask Medusa how much money they made off it.

We’ll be following Gimmesound closely over the next few months and will, as always, keep you updated.