That is a false statement and is far from the actual truth. WaTunes no longer charges $10 per month as we eliminated that whole model way back in March when this article took place.

As of now, WaTunes enables every artist & label to gain access to iTunes for free (meaning no upfront charges + 100% of your royalties). For other store services, you can upgrade to VIP for $29.95 per year or do NOISE for $69.95 per album.

You’ve heard it straight from the source!

Kevin Rivers
CEO, WaTunes

Thank you for your inspiring words. It is your support that makes us work hard to provide ways to help music artists succeed and achieve their dreams.

@Missy: Thank you for your awesome words. I’d like to give you a hug too. All of us at WaTunes truly appreciate your kind words and support and I hope that we’ll be able to assist you to make your music career a tremendous success.

@RealityArchitect: Thank you for your inspiring words. It truly pleases me to see great feedback of what we’re doing. Our goal is to create a huge change in the industry. There is a void to fill and we’re here to fulfill it. Creating this whole new music world is just the beginning for WaTunes. As you’ve said “Infinite Possibilities”, I strongly value those words as with WaTunes, I aim to make those possibilities truly endless.

Until next time, I thank everyone for your feedback (whether it is positive or negative) as this makes us find ways to improve and provide a much friendlier, faster, and quality service. Thank you once again for making WaTunes possible.

Kevin Rivers
CEO, WaTunes

What you are doing is genius! The digital environment has created a paradigm shift not only for the music industry but for all business.

Alot of comments I have read here seem not to factoring in the phenomenon (That has arisen from the paradigm shift) that “free” is a legitimate model (Did anyone pay to be on facebook? or Myspace? or Linked In?….E.T.C.).

Companies that use a freemium model (like kevin has chosen to do) are open to succeed in new ways because they will be creatively developing new ways to build strong relationships with customers and leading the online economy with innovative ways to earn money around “free”.

What a perfect way to entice your customers to join your community. Give them something free that will A) help them make money and B) help them achieve their life long dreams of being a successful artist.

Once kevin has built his community around helping, he will have infinite possibilities to earn money with his active audiences. (The real money or currency on the web is “attention”)

I wish you all the best Kevin from one entrepreneur to another, enjoy the ride my friend it looks like its going to be an adventure!

If you need any help I would love to have a brainstorming session with you.

Peace!
“Infinite Possibilities!”

I would spend very little time responding to negativity, wouldn’t waste these wonderful creative minds on that.

Keep up the good work please. Looking forward to waveTunes new model. Cheers guys

Yes, suh, they sho’ izzz!

If this is what the “CEO” does to English, I wouldn’t like to see what he does to money….

They be from Atlanta Gowgia, sho’ ’nuff!!

//
Ok to follow on from one of my previous posts about CDBaby vs Tunecore, there is now another road that unsigned artists and Indie lables can take and it WaTunes.com.
As quoted in the WaTunes …

//
Ok to follow on from one of my previous posts about CDBaby vs Tunecore, there is now another road that unsigned artists and Indie lables can take and it WaTunes.com.
As quoted in the WaTunes …

……

All of us, TuneCore, CD Baby, we’re all building businesses that aim to get the artists into the stores without making them sign their lives away by entangling them into vicious contracts. Good. I don’t want anyone to lose sight of how noble that cause is. Anyone willing to try and build a company without exploiting musicians is a good guy in my book.

You’re trying a bold strategy, I admit, and I’m really curious to see how it goes, especially if you scale. Should be interesting.

Do I think TuneCore strikes the perfect balance of fair price and awesome product? Well, sure, but I’m biased. Do we need improvement? Every company does, and we’re working on it. So it’s a race, like any industry, and the consumer is the the judge and the ultimate winner.

So as I say to everyone else in this space, best of luck: may the better model and the best service win.

–Peter
peter@tunecore.com

Free is always going to be the best deal for artists, no argument there, but it isn’t unfair to expect some recompense for doing a good job, and getting paid for your work means that you have a truly sustainable business model.

As well as working in music distribution, I am also pretty conversant with online advertising rates, and to generate enough traffic to pay five people’s wages is not a small undertaking.

Assuming a $30K salary for each employee (not unreasonable) you’d need 375million pageviews annually at a $0.40 CPM to generate that kind of revenue. That’s without paying the artists whose music is onsite a cent for all the streams of their music. Myspace achieved it, because they were innovators, but now that there are other models established, with existing major record label partnerships, how are WaMusic going to distinguish themselves against competitors like Spotify and Last FM?

No hard feelings here guys, we’re all trying to find ways into a market that’s tough enough without slinging mud… race you to an IPO?