With an aim to make digital distribution for independent artistes easy, France based JTV Digital partnered with Wordpay, earlier this month to allow for online payments. JTV Digital delivers music to outlets like Spotify, iTunes, Deezer, Amazon among other digital stores and charges artistes a fee for the service. The company also operates a record label, JTV Records, for producing and distributing its own music. JTV Digital owner and CEO Jeremie Varengo, told Radioandmusic.com about the company’s plans and how it helps emerging artistes.
Excerpts:
What was the motive behind expanding your bases to other countries?
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Artists and music fans are potentially located anywhere. While the digital music market is largely dominated by USA, UK, France and Germany, there is still some room for other countries to play a role in that business. Regardless of their country of origin, artists are eager to get their music heard, downloaded, streamed. This decision would welcome any talent with their diversity, while offering the same level of services to emerging countries than to others.
How will this move help the artistes and JTV digital?
Regardless of where the artist lives, they can now get their songs to the biggest digital music stores like iTunes, Amazon or Spotify to name a few.
Kindly highlight the challenges that the company could encounter and also spell out the strategies to tackle the same?
Customer satisfaction will be the key challenge. Thus we plan to expand our client support resources whenever required, and make sure there’s always an available agent to respond to any query, regardless of the time zone.
What are the business models and marketing plans for this year to increase hold in new markets?
By the end of the year, we shall be adding more digital stores outlets to our platform for specifically addressing emerging markets, artist needs, finalising the integration of our YouTube monetization process for ensuring new revenue streams for our artists, implementing iPhone or iPad music applications distribution, setting up a publishing department and much more is in the pipeline.
What are your plans for the Asian market?
In Asia, music subscription services tend to become more and more successful, therefore we will have to make sure the most important digital stores of the zone are part of our offer.
Which countries in Asia have the potential for growth in digital music space and will they have different models?
India, South Korea and China definitely have the biggest growth potential for digital music in Asia. At this stage we do not plan to setup different models for artists from these countries, but time will tell if there is a need for specific plans.
Partnering with Worldpay was to make the transition simpler for new and potential customers around the globe, but don’t you feel that you will have to merge with a few local partners to give the push to JTV’s services?
The decision was taken to go with WorldPay after studying various payment solutions, global and local ones. We considered this partner had the widest geographical coverage while ensuring a high level of payment processing security.
How much per cent growth has your company aimed through this new development?
Only time will tell, but 25 per cent seems to be realistic.
Which countries are most of your artistes located in?
At the moment most of our artists are located in USA, France and UK, but there is a clear demand from emerging countries, especially Nigeria, Ghana and Asia.
How constantly do you provide new content to digital stores?
New content is delivered every day to the digital stores.
JTV Digital is associated with many well-known names in the digital platform, how do you manage to get the content of the artistes there? What are the criteria?
We use technical facilities provided by one of the Apple-approved partner, who build the system and we run the digital music distribution and surrounding services. Any artist can join potentially. However, we require the music to be professionally mastered and artists shall guarantee that their content does not infringe any global or local copyright regulation (artists/labels shall own the rights for the content they distribute), and make sure their songs do not evoke sexual, racist, violent or any other harmful connotations.
Apart from the distribution, JTV provides various other services, kindly update us about the same.
Yes, we do provide additional or surrounding services. We do digital mastering (for polishing sound quality before delivering to stores), have connections with studios to perform ‘mastered for iTunes’ mastering, video clip deliveries to iTunes, we can create custom websites and so on. Everything is detailed in this section of our website:http://www.jtvdigital.com/shop. We have also negotiated various discount offers and special packages for promotion, radio placement or publishing rights administration. Our friends at Dotted Music can also build great digital marketing campaigns for our artists.
How challenging is the ever-changing digital space?
It is extremely challenging. There are new digital music companies being created almost weekly. A lot will be unsuccessful, some rare will succeed or at least survive a few years. Competition in the digital music distribution sector is also harsh, and we aim to stand above the crowd by supplying the best possible customer support and expertise in our area.
What are your future plans?
We will definitely setup a publishing service, and look at any new potential revenue streams and partnerships for our artists and clients.
