I'll use this topic to explore with Scott Stambaugh of Independent Artists Company for an interview.

Scott, please take your time – no rush on this one. Thanks

Audience particpation is welcomed. We are, after all, in-the-round and unplugged.

Any comments that are off the record can simply be preceeded with the characters OTR.

Folks, we're pleased to have Scott Stambaugh of IAC here for an interview to be published in Studio Reviews Magazine.

Many of you know him in online forums as the sardonic and witty "Al", and in the world of OMD as the ever-prolific, chart-topping "Father Time". Scott Stambaugh is the COO and Head of Programming at Independent Artists Company MDS (Music Distribution Site).

I interviewed Father Time in-depth in 2000.

Virtual Rock Star: An Interview with Father Time (part 1)
Virtual Rock Star: An Interview with Father Time (part 2)

And here we are in 2006 with Scott to get the lowdown on IAC and its developments, and the future of online music distribution (OMD).

Father Time's IAC Artist Page at http://www.independentartistscompany.com/artist.aspx?ID=3874

Scott, to kick things off: What is IAC? And could you take us back to the inception of IAC. When and how it got started, and your involvement with it?

Well, Independent Artists Company (IAC) is based on the concept that indie artists don't get the kind of opportunities they deserve in the larger music business, all the avenues to the mainstream are blocked. The only route open for independents to get true exposure is to buy into the industry themselves and bridge the gap by force, so that's what we're doing. The music site is only one element of IAC, more will be unfolding in the course of 2006-2007.

The seeds of IAC began in summer of 2003 when I was contacted by Dave Walton who is my partner and the CEO of the company. IAC was in planning for around a year before the site was launched. During that year, we embarked upon what was surely the most comprehensive talent search in the history of the internet. There were so many outlets for music by this point after the demise of mp3.com, we listened to in the tens of thousands of acts and worked very hard to bring the best of them to Independent Artists Company. Consequently we became known first and foremost for quality music. A lot of the phenomenal artists at IAC were found in obscure nooks and crannies on the web, honestly it was shocking, the depth of talent and songwriting one could find if they really took the time to cover all that ground. Sometime about the midway point of that search it became undisputedly clear that the best of the indies were not just a little bit better than the mainstream acts we'd all be forcefed for years, but as a collective were a great new era of music in themselves. I can tell you I've heard more songs that I truly love on IAC in the last year than I heard in the 15 years prior in mainstream radio rotations and on the Billboard charts. It is our mission at IAC to do what we can to help the cream rise to the top, and this group of artists, to put it bluntly, appear to be pretty unstoppable..

Dave and I have a background of work with indies. He founded another music site that is still in operation today (he sold his majority ownership to focus on a more important project - IAC), and is considered one of the innovators of internet radio, having started the popular shoutcast feed/chat format that is all over the net today. I had done some work with a previous site in the area of artist relations and also founded an artist rights organization. We met back in 2000 when Dave was one of the first people in online music who supported Father Time's music, having his site sponsor some internet concerts of mine, which were also sort of groundbreaking. He's a visionary of sorts, and over time it was obvious we are kindred spirits, our strengths compliment each other perfectly. This also goes for the 3rd member of the trio, Sandy Zieger, who is our ace-in-the-hole, recently brought Rachel Fuller and Pete Townshend to IAC for instance. Another thing we have that most sites don't is a fully staffed Journalism dept. Most of the IAC staff wear many hats, we work very hard on site development and some of the things coming very soon will shock the world, I believe.

Wow! Great site! As an independent artist making underground alternative music (Influences: Cocteau Twins, the Beatles, American Music Club), I have been searching for an outlet like this for a long time. I will definitely sign up for an artist account.

Thanks to Dot and Scott for this thread!

EXCELLENT INFO!

welcome scott...
and a question:

i've just recently joined IAC, and have just gotten started on my Artist Page...

what is the best way to go about Advertising for my debut release of my album "Trouble", on the Planet Records Label, by using my IAC page?

Wow. That is a great site. I look forward to checking it out often, and hopefully putting my band there someday also.

rock

bford

Starfish, glad to hear it, and judging by your influences, I'll probably be glad to hear your music too.

Gonzo, I saw you joined. Welcome to the Indie Capital of the World! I added you to my Planet Bond station last week, btw.

Ways to use IAC to promote your CD, let's see..

Well one good way to get your music out there is the use of our stations. Anybody who has a page can create stations of their favorite music at IAC. The idea is to create a nice playlist based on some theme or another and usually the artist includes a few of his or her own songs as well. If you're an active station owner, the kind who updates regularly and promotes your station, our avid listener base will find it and all the artists on your station will benefit. Consequently artists who you include and station owners you link to (we have an elaborate link system) will find you also, and if they like your music, the number of stations you're on will multiply fast. It's almost unbelievable how active the station community is at IAC. Sure other sites have had things like this but we're proud to say that we believe our stations are not only the most user friendly and look the coolest , but have aspects totally unique to OMDs like an editable tagboard on each station page which really helps the networking aspect.

I guess I should mention also that you can of course do a big feature of your CD in the upper html section of your page.

IAC Prime members can sell their CDs and superhifi downloads in the IAC shopping cart for a subscription fee. Our philosophy for the merchants aspect of IAC is that we have it as a convenience for the artist, not as a big profit source like other sites who charge a substantial fee for each product you want to sell or the corporate download sales sites that take a big chunk from the artist off the top. At IAC you get to set your own price on download sales and you could literally sell downloads for 30 songs and sell your whole lifelong catalog of CDs in your IAC shopping cart.

You could also sell your CD in the form of a DMD, which is IAC's innovative digital delivery concept. The DMD Ultrapage allows you to package with your music all kinds of extras that allow you to really give your fans an up-close and personal vantage point.

and, well, there's a huge new feature coming to IAC within the next few weeks (it's almost imminent) that addresses more than anything we've done up to this point how to connect with listeners. I'm hoping that before this interview is over I can announce it because it's got to be the biggest moment in the history of our site, at this juncture. I just can't wait to talk about it.

Scott (Al)

good for you - congratulations. IAC is definitely an excellent site and it's good to see your dreams coming to fruition here.

The streaming sounds pretty good in my humble opinion. Just wondered if there's any technical details you can share about what we're listening to (bit rate etc.).

and yes, your stations are very cool.

thanks
Tube

Currently, an artist page at IAC allows for three free song uploads of MP3's. Should we expect this to last indefinitely? Or is there a limited timeframe on that?

And then there is the paid subscriptions for artists. What the rates? And what would an artist expect to get for their subscription.

I only see a way to pay with Paypal. Will IAC take straight credit card transactions in the future?

[OTR] I ask about the credit cards because I went to upgrade, but didn't do it when I saw the only way to upgrade was by using Paypal. [/OTR]

I think it is amazing, and I appreciate the encouragement and help you've given to me and my music. I'm very grateful, and as my slow train picks up a bit more steam, I will try to make more use of what you've done. I just want to have my product in place before I start trying to drum up attention.

Anyway, I thank you and also say congratulations on a job very well done.

ok..

kingvibe, thanks ! Hope to see you at IAC soon. Sooner you get some music up, will give station owners some extra time to find ya.

Tubedriver, thanks as well. Our streaming is done by a special flash player that uses some added enhancements for the compressed files, a bit of auditory compensation. I might also add that we allow uploading of mp3s in all bitrates so a pretty fair amount of artists on the site use mp3s of 256-320 kbps which despite what some say sound a lot better than 128s imo.

Dot, yes the purely credit card transactions are on the way, but the IAC offices have made special arrangements in cases of those who don't want to use paypal at the present time. Fwiw, we do have a system now where you can use your credit card but it goes thru paypal.

The 3 free songs, there's been no discussion whatsoever of that being a temporary situation. We get some truly great artists coming in for free pages and we're about quality songs so I expect that policy will be longterm.

ok, IAC Prime. Costs $29.95/6 months or $49.95/year. What that includes is having up to 30 songs on your page, and an IAC shopping cart that allows you to sell download singles, CDs by consignment and DMDs(you receive 85% of all sales). It also includes a photo gallery, and a membership to the IAIA (International Academy of Independent Artists). There are more benefits that are being added within the next 3 months or so (creation and sale of harddisc CD product, a ramped up stat package.

by the way we're glad to have you on the site!

and Tao,

well thanks, that's real nice of you to say. You know we're happy to have you at IAC. A couple of you guys from the Planet, you and Dot and Flametop for instance, are indie forces of nature in your own right. Knowing you folks are at IAC along with a lot of great new artists I've gotten to know, it sure seems like if a revolution is going to happen, all the proper elements are coming together. I kind of see it as a giant pilgrimage all headed in the same direction, to change the face of popular music.

Scott, I just poked around your site, and must say it is amazing.

I see many folks I am familiar with, and more I am not. But the content whenever I clicked on any artist was very helpful and seemingly current.

Bravo for you man. I gotta poke around some more and read this thread completely. But I am awe struck.

Very Impressed.

Scott,

I'm very impressed and enthusiastic about what you are doing. I was able to locate some intriguing music very quickly (Secondhand Jive, as well as locals The Happies).

A couple of questions:
1. What are your thoughts on community and collaboration? I feel like that was a key to the late 60's scene (Woodstock, The Byrds and Bob Dylan, Richard Thompson playing on Nick Drake's records, etc.). There are a couple of collaboration websites out there, but my experience with them hasn't been very positive (they seemed like a limited group of insiders that weren't interested in expanding).
2. What features does IAC have that help the deserving obscure get more recognition? It seems like the setup of a lot of the other download sites make it easy for the already visible artists to stay that way and very difficult for obscure artists to get any notice (the rich get richer...).

OTR: The first couple of times I tried the website, I got a bunch of errors. I should have written them down, but they had something to do with server errors and .NET. I'm running WebPosition's Scheduler in the background (a .Net-based application), but the site seems to be working fine for me now, so I'm not sure that's related. Just wanted to let you know.

j6p, thanks, we try to make great indies easy to find.

James, yes, the Happies. Every one of their songs are good and Thread Paper Girl is one of my favorite indie songs ever.

Community and collaboration - well we have an active forum at IAC with a review section that a lot of people seem to be getting into. As far as collabs go, well, on a personal note I just released a DMD called With a Little Help from my Peeps where the theme is.. 17 songs collaborating with various indies. It's much better than my first CD so I guess I'm as into collabs as anybody. As far as IAC goes, we do have something called the Collaboration Zone on our Artist Help Station page, which is a moving scroll of collab ads. I expect we'll be doing something more soon, we haven't started a new forum for awhile and that might go over, now that our forums are getting pretty lively.

As for your second question, what do we do to help the deserving obscure, well, we are about the deserving obscure. In many cases we found them and brought them to IAC in the first place. Anyway to further elaborate, our main chart is the KIAC Big 50, which is presented in the same kind of format as a heavy rotation radio chart, and is compiled by the programming dept. so it doesn't involve artists' song streaming count whatsoever. Our Hitline on the front page is also entirely generated from the programming dept. We work very hard at getting great new artists somewhere prominent on the site so that our listener base can find them. I mentioned earlier our journalism dept and you can find a series of interviews with some of the top IAC artists in our Spotlight Magazine. Recently Michelle Rene, a featured country artist at IAC, won the the Colgate Country Showdown in Nashville TN and won a check for $100,000 and the title of the "Best New Country Act in the Nation". Michelle credited IAC for helping her with the judges cause marketability was one of the criteria and Michelle was the first pure country artist we had crossover into our Top 5 on KIAC back in early 2005. Anyway we are so proud of her!

I have to add though, that in addition to that part of IAC, we do have play charts as well where artists can promote themselves for greater exposure so we do try to provide the best of both worlds.

OTR: James, it sounds like the first time you caught the site in a system recycle which usually takes a minute or so. Normally those don't happen very often but the new project we're working on is a wing of the site so vast that it requires extra live testing.

Hi Scott. Your site is impressive indeed and it certainly appears that you are offering much needed services to independent artists. Perhaps I missed it, but I was disappointed to see that you are not covering the ambient/tribal-ambient/new age genre. Is anything happening in this area?

Thanks,

drbam

OTR: Scott, thanks for the detailed responses and the explanation of the site error messages. I like what I'm hearing. One thought that I had is that it might be nice to make the link to the artist's site a little more obvious. I had to hunt to find it. There is always the danger of losing people, sometimes addressed by opening the link in a new window.

OTR: One more note. I had a chance to mix the Happies once here is Salt Lake City. In addition to being a great band, they were extremely polite and appreciative. All right. Enouogh plugs for the Happies. Back to the topic.

drbam, there is a lot of ambient and new age music on the site. Some of it is in electronic, some in world, some in easy listening. We're in the process of discussions about adding several more main genres, that was one, ambient/new age that was suggested. I might add that one thing our site has that I always liked is the ability to use creative subgenres. where you get to write in a description of your song as a new subgenre. Here are some of the ones listed on the Father Time page.

loud topical rock
sports ticker rock
contraceptive reggaeish folk rock
folk rock love trance
psychedelic riff rock
futuristic charisma rock

and of course the ever popular "theme song for a legend"

OTR: James, you mean the link back to the front page?

quote:

James, yes, the Happies. Every one of their songs are good and Thread Paper Girl is one of my favorite indie songs ever.

that is a COOL song!

sorry - back to the thread

Scott, congrats man.....really cool vibe going on there....

I have a few questions:

I agree about the lack of opportunities for indie artists in the main-stream, but...The internet seems super-saturated with indie artists, and venues for them. How is IAC different/ better than some of the other sites...???

Do you get a lot of outside/non musician traffic, or is it mainly all artists?

I personally have been trying to figure out, what the next big phase in indie music distibution is going to be, (since the industry is scrambling)... and all I keep comming up with is a grass roots kind of thing.......I would love to see more regionally huge bands, than nationally/internationally huge artists (usually these huge acts are corporate driven and suck!!! (though not all)....

...I wonder if the CD is dead? It almost seems like we should give some of our music away for free, and sell other stuff as a bonus......IE merchandise...bonus tracks ET AL..and of course touring, and being a damn good live act.....
...what's your take??

Also, was wondering what you thought about all of the illegal downloading of music, and how it can affect indie artists?

Thanks for your time....

cheers, kt