Mint Chicks favour local start-up over Warner

GONE: The Mint Chicks say they sent Warner 'packing' in favour of a local start-up

Relevant offers

Wellington-based global internet entrepreneur WebFund is backing what it hopes will be a new way to make money in the cruel and unusual world of digital music sales.

The Musichy.pe proposition allows fans to remix their favourite bands' music and is being promoted as "the un-label", says Wedbfund chairman Dave Moskovitz.

To prove the point, MusicHy.pe's first signing is Kiwi band The Mint Chicks, who say they "sent their major label Warner packing last December", and are using the local start-up to launch their new EP "Bad Buzz".

Moskovitz says the business model is based on the expectation that straight music sales are increasingly difficult, whereas artists are increasingly using digital presence to promote their live appearances and merchandise sales, and incentivising music sales using competitions.

Artists will see most of the revenue on download sales, says Moskovitz.  "Bands get very little money from downloads. If you publish on I-Tunes for 99 cents a track, you might see 2 cents of that. With MusicHy.pe, it's more like 90 cents."

Bands will also get a substantial proportion of competition entry fees and MusicHy.pe will clip the ticket on third party sales as well. The site operates a loyalty points system and is intended to make music sales over the Internet easy and to improve the economics of the bands themselves.

"Most people don't want to steal music. It's just that it's often that that's easier than actually buying it."

Launching in New Zealand this month, the first competition invites fans to compete in remixing and uploading the band's recent hit "Crazy? Yes! Dumb? No!", by allowing fans access to the digital "stems" - separate instrument tracks that create the music once put together - which can be manipulated in widely used music software programmes such as Garageband.

Mosokovitz is moving fast. From a concept in August last year to this month's local launch, the plan is to take two months' experience with Musichy.pe to a band in an offshore market next.

"This is an international play," says Moskovitz, although almost all elements of development have occurred among Wellington web developers. "Like most web start-ups, another person could do it, but we are ahead of them.

"It's based on open source software, although we've written some of our own code too."

The site is optimised for easy use with existing global social networking sites including Facebook, Twitter, Bandcam, and flickr.

Describing major music labels as "slow moving, risk-averse dinosaurs, and increasingly irrelevant", the Mint Chicks' Ruban Nielson says Musichy.pe is chance to "work with someone who get what we are trying to do, and to take some chances". We were introduced to MusicHy.pe through mutual friends and after our first meeting I knew we'd found the right people."

A second competition, to make a music video for worldwide distribution, will accompany the release of their "Bad Buzz" EP in mid-February, while a third competition challenges designers to create the new official Mint Chicks T-shirt.

Musichy.pe will release a limited edition USB memory stick version of the results, but there is one rule that won't be broken: no CD's. Only dinosaurs buy them, apparently.

- BusinessDesk