Prefueled might be the next generation music store
November 7th, 2007 by Nico Ramon
You might have already heard about the Luxembourg based online music store Prefueled and its “entertainment hubs”, which were introduced this year’s February at the MIDEM trade fair in Cannes. The company offers an online social network, online music store, entertainment hubs and they also support unsigned artists. I’ve been following Prefueled’s development with an interest for a while now and I was pleasantly surprised when I had the chance to experiment with their entertainment hub, or Fuel Tank as they call it, in Sweden.
These Fuel Tank entertainment hubs are the thing that sets Prefueled apart from its competitors. Basically they are just computers in a stylished box with a touchscreen display that are connected to Prefueled online music store and allow you to transfer music onto your portable music player using USB, Bluetooth or Wi-Fi connection. The entertainment hubs are placed in key destinations (hotels, airports, music stores etc.) and they offer an innovative way to reach those music consumers, who are not yet familiar with online music stores. Although Internet is a familiar environment for the new generation of music consumers, there are still a lot of elderly people who don’t have a clue about MySpace, Last.fm, iTunes or any other music distribution service.
Even though Prefueled sells content from all four major record labels and thousands of indie labels, the most interesting feature is their community for unsigned artists. You can choose to sell your music through Prefueled’s online music store and entertainment hubs or you can also decide to give your music away for free. If you choose to sell your music, the revenues are split 50/50 after Prefueled has deducted credit card fees and paid royalties to copyrightholders and copyright organisations. I read through the terms and conditions for signing up and as far as I understood there weren’t any unfair or tricky terms. Bear in mind though that Prefueled has some audio quality requirements for unsigned artists, so don’t be surprised if your home studio recordings are disapproved.
Prefueled’s online social community (Prefueled People) doesn’t offer any groundbreaking functions and it’s basically just a more polished version of MySpace. On the time I was writing this blog post there were only 900 registered users, so the community has to grow exponentially before it offers any real promotional value for artists. As for the market regions, the company is first targeting only nordic countries (Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark) so it might take a while before you see the entertainment hubs outside Europe. However, in my humble opinion Prefueled is worth a try since it has a certain amount of hype around it and the entertainment hubs offer an alternative way to distribute your music to the people on the streets.
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The last thing we need is another social networking site. That said I took a look for myself and it does look great. For selling music I have only the concern that a unsigned artist owns the copyrights and so the payments to the copyright societys is taking money from the Indie artist and putting it into a pool to which the labels will get most of the funds.
netvalar said this on November 7th, 2007 at 11:06 pm
Netvalar, I do agree with you about the current amount of social networking sites, too much is too much. The real value that Prefueled might offer is extending artists’ music distribution to the streets and thus giving artists more visibility, if nothing else. For unsigned artists I see giving away music for free as the most reasonable option. Although, it might be that music consumers, who are not so Internet savvy, are much more willing to actually pay for music since they have less know-how about music piracy.
As for the copyright collectives, according to my knowledge record labels don’t get most of the funds. I think copyright collectives can provide a valuable service for the artist. It always depends on the case in question, but generally speaking copyright collectives oversee that your songs are not abused or used without permission. They try to make sure that everytime your songs are played on the radio, reproduced or publicly performed, you get your share of revenue. If the artist doesn’t have a record label or a publisher, the artist gets all the revenue. These are fairly complicated issues and I recommend for everyone to examine these websites:
http://www.bemuso.com/musicbiz.....gcopyright
http://www.mustard-mg.com/musb.....eneral.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_collective
Nico Ramon said this on November 8th, 2007 at 12:00 am
Doesn’t look like the Prefueled People site is quite as slick as the Prefueled music store. Beta? With the music store in the background I can imagine that you could come up with some pretty cool bells and whistles to promote and reward people for sharing their music. Time will tell if it is one site too many… I like this blog btw, just discovered. No links to I digg or recommend it? I don’t have a blog of my own so can’t link.
mehe said this on November 13th, 2007 at 3:28 pm
@ Mehe that is a good point about Digg. I use stumble and have stumbled a couple of these posts. Since Wicked Whammy uses Feedburner It would be easy to activate the feedflare option and chooses those buttons to be added. I can look into as it has been a while since I did it for my own blog. Also Mehe if you have a social networking profile odds are you have a blog you just don’t use it. I have pointed this out to my own readers who wanted to practice writing before submitting to my blog. Though at this time noone has submitted any music related articles.
netvalar said this on December 8th, 2007 at 1:44 pm
In regards to the copyright collectives they are a necc evil I admit though if you look at some of the math they use for dividing up collected royalties it adds up on the majors side. This really is nothing considering that they help in the protection of copyrights. I don’t think I really want to know more then that about these societies.
netvalar said this on December 8th, 2007 at 1:47 pm