music:nuvo reborn: upgrade complete!

MUSIC:NUVO has been re-born, re-vitalized, and re-focused, offering indie artists a truly all-in-one solution for their online merchandising needs.

As a relatively new entry into the world of digital music sales, MUSIC:NUVO has spent the last 9 months in constant development. From the beginning it was the intention to offer the best place for artists to sell their digital content, with extremely low rates ($8/month) and high artist royalties (70% of retail).
This goal morphed into wanting to be the best place for artists to sell ALL their content - digital and physical - whether it be MP3s, CDs, DVDs, T-shirts, Posters, or any other number of products.

Now we believe we’re on the cusp of realizing that goal:

• MUSIC:NUVO is the only store completely and solely focused on the independent artist
• Through MUSIC:NUVO you can sell absolutely any product you want - digital or physical
• For digital products you still earn 70% of retail
• For physical products artists earn 90% of retail - artist handles fulfillment
  And it still only costs $8 / month is now FREE

Does all that sound good? If you’re an artist and want to LEARN MORE, come visit us!

For the benefit of our existing artist family, here’s an outline of all the upgrades that went into re-launching MUSIC:NUVO…

REDESIGNED ARTIST STORE NAVIGATION
Each artist store now includes five product categories (Music, Merch, Videos, Graphics, & Bundles) plus a Home page which allows the artist to post an artist image, short biography, and web links. We dropped the Ringtunes category because, when it came down to it, we are not a mobile provider… ringtune users 90% of the time download their ringers directly from their phone. We cannot offer this service, which meant we were simply offering customers the ability to download clipped MP3s directly to their computer, and then figure out for themselves how to get it to their phone - that’s a mediocre service so we stopped it. The five categories we kept pretty much capture anything an artist would want to sell.

SUPERIOR DIGITAL DOWNLOAD SERVICE
The great thing about MUSIC:NUVO is that it’s easy to send your artists there, and your Artist Store is entirely dedicated to you…. it’s not like you’re sending them to some external application like iTunes and making your customers search around for you. Selling your digital downloads via MUSIC:NUVO gives you several great advantages. First, we let you keep more of your digital download sales than any of our competitors - 70% of retail for all downloads. CD Baby offers a nice digital distribution service, but the royalty rate there can be misleading - they say you get to keep 91%, but that’s 91% after iTunes takes their cut - when all is said and done you only get 63%. Second, you choose the quality of the songs you offer for sale - typically iTunes will sell tracks at 128 kbps (descent quality). But if you want to sell tracks at 256 kbps, or even higher, via MUSIC:NUVO you have that option. And finally, a great resource for MUSIC:NUVO artists are our embeddable stores called Top Tracks Stores. Like Snocap, you can place these small versions of your Artist Store in your artist website or social networking profile… Unlike Snocap, through MUSIC:NUVO we offer the ability to sell your full albums via your Top Tracks Store, and again, you keep more of your money with 70% of retail royalty rates.

SELL PHYSICAL CDS
Artists can now sell physical CDs directly from their artist store, and they keep 90% of royalties. Compare this to CD Baby (who keeps $4 / CD sold) or even PayPal (who will charge you 3% + $.30 for every transaction). Let MUSIC:NUVO be your all in one store - direct all of your customers to your MUSIC:NUVO store, and in one transaction they can buy your physical CD, your new digital single, and a T-shirt! Also note, there are no product setup fees for either digital downloads or physical CDs.

Note that artists are responsible for their own fulfillment of orders. Upon sale of a physical product, MUSIC:NUVO will send the artist a fulfillment email indicating where to send the product. MUSIC:NUVO will collect shipping costs on your behalf from the artist and reimburse you via your quarterly royalty check.

SELL PHYSICAL MERCH
Yup, just like CDs you can now sell any type of physical merch product you want… T-shirts, posters, stickers, buttons, coffee mugs, hats, bandannas… heck, sell your dog for all we care. And once again, the artist keeps 90% of all royalties from physical products.

PRODUCT SETUP FEES REDUCED
It has always been the case that recorded music products (digital albums and physical CDs) do not have product setup fees - this is still the case. Initially artists were charged various product setup fees for non-album products, ranging from $5 to $25. These fees have all been dropped to $5 per item. So, for instance, if you want to setup a DVD or a T-shirt product for sale in your artist store, you will be charged a ONE-TIME fee of $5 per item. Compare this to CD Baby who charges artists $30 for every new product!

NOTE: Product setup fees have now been entirely eliminated as of 2008! [1/2/2008]

NEW MEDIA PLAYER
Previously when shoppers clicked on “preview” links in an artist store they were taken to an external media player - MAC users particularly had trouble with this player and often times couldn’t hear previews. All Artist Stores and Top Tracks Stores now benefit from a built in Flash based player through which they can listen to clips, compatible on all browsers.

A LITTLE BEAUTIFICATION…
The original musicnuvo.com website suffered various browser incompatibilities, especially for MAC users and Firefox users. We have shifted our website and all of our artists stores over to a CSS based stylesheet design, which in layman’s terms means we did away with those browser incompatibilities. Also, artists will remember that when a visitor would open up an artist store, the store would act as a pop-up and resize itself (and shift to the right hand side of the screen). The original purpose of this was to make the store un-intrusive and prevent taking people away from the artist website. However, this feature was giving us problems and didn’t make sense in tabbed browsing environments (e.g. - Firefox and the new Internet Explorer), so we did away it. Artists are now given as part of their Artist Resources a Javascript enabled link, which when used, will simulate the original intention of the resized store

READY, SET, GO!
So those are the updates! We welcome any comments or questions! Artists - be sure to check the layout and design of your new Artist Store and make sure everything is working properly. And if you’re an artist who is interested in learning more about the benefits of our MUSIC:NUVO Artist Stores and how they can work for you, please drop in and take tour tour!


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Put to use the most powerful online store for independent artists and start selling all of your content from one place! Visit http://www.musicnuvo.com to learn more.