Artists looking for a new way to distribute their videos, music tracks, and soon, games and digital photos, have a new way to promote their media and sell their digital goods online.
RedAntenna is a new company offering services specifically targeted for musicians, independent filmmakers, and other artists looking to sell their creative content online without a label. The firm's proprietary ShopLet Widget lets you set your own price for your own content, while taking a straight seven percent cut of the sale, leaving the remaining profit for you and affiliate Webmasters.
How It Works: For Producers and Affiliates
For producers, RedAntenna's three-step process is easy — once you have your media ready for public distribution, you go online to create a membership then use the service to upload your work and start earning money.
When uploading to RedAntenna, you simply gather your MP3, video, or software file and submit it online. A big part of RedAntenna linking is through affiliate referrals, and this is one of the more unique features that RedAntenna offers, when compared to similar services.
If you upload a music video of your band, you (the producer) get to decide your own value by setting the selling price yourself. If you find sales are slow, you can go in at any time through your member dashboard and change the price of the download. The content producers also get to specify the commission that an affiliate will earn when they are the referral for the sale.
Obviously, it is better to have more affiliates promoting your RedAntenna content, so you can adjust your own set pricing in an effort to increase the commission you offer, making your RedAntenna content more appealing to affiliates.
As a part of the service, RedAntenna will also match your content with partner sites and allow affiliate Webmasters to start linking to your work. Artists can also sell the content on their own Web spaces and keep ninety-seven percent of the sales, which is the remainder after RedAntenna's commission.
For those wanting to join the RedAntenna Affiliate Program, once enrolled, RedAntenna will match your site's content with digital content that your site visitors can purchase. The program is completely free for Webmasters to join, and in addition to adding the ShopLet Widget to your site, you can also expand your online e-commerce presence by opening your own RedAntenna Web shop.
Once your content has been uploaded, the RedAntenna service pushes it out to the store on their main Web site, as well as Web sites run by affiliates and producers, and other RedAntenna partner sites and MySpace pages. This lets consumers encounter RedAntenna media online in a variety of ways.
Freddy Nager, U.S. business development manager for RedAntenna, told Ecommerce-Guide.com that a part of the distribution service is to match your content to other sites for promotion and better quality leads. "If you have a punk band and upload a punk track, we'll automatically push your track out to specific sites looking for punk material."
To further assist producers in increasing their sales, RedAntenna will be reaching out to consumers with an online video show, called RedAntenna Spotlight. Nager said the video will feature a host who talks about the hottest new bands on RedAntenna.
"We'll be distributing the show on YouTube, MySpace and all the various video sharing Web sites, giving the artists who use our service a platform where they can sell their content but also promote the artists at the same time."
In addition to handling a lot of the linking, purchasing and payment details for you, RedAntenna also offers anti-piracy measures for those wanting to sell their own games and software through the ShopLet Widget. Here, developers simply need to download a free patented SDK for each of the applications you want to sell and follow the instructions in the SDK to enable tracking of each sale.
Supported Formats and Payouts
Artists and affiliates can track their performance, sales and profits through on online dashboard, and also adjust sale prices and affiliate commissions on-the-fly. To get paid, producers and affiliates do have to register with the online payment system, ClickandBuy. While the RedAntenna program itself is worth investigating, the platform is deeply tied to ClickandBuy, in that you must have a ClickandBuy account to join RedAntenna's affiliate or producer program.
Unfortunately, in our testing when setting up an account with ClickandBuy, we found it difficult to connect with ClickandBuy customer service through e-mail and by phone to complete the account registration process. Still, existing ClickandBuy users should have no problem getting enrolled with RedAntenna, but some affiliates and producers not currently using ClickandBuy for online payments may find the enrollment process time consuming.
In terms of supported files, RedAntenna, in its beta launch form, supports a wide variety of digital media formats, including popular video file formats such s .MOV, .AVI, .MPG, .VOB, .M4V as well as a large number of audio formats. Presently, RedAntenna has put a bigger focus on artists looking to distribute music and videos, and also plans to tailor their upcoming promotions to bands and similar content developers. In a conversation with Ecommerce-Guide.com, Nager did say, however, that the company will soon expand its services to those producing other types of content including photos, graphics, templates and text.
Vangie Beal is a seasoned online marketplace seller, frequent contributor to ECommerce-Guide.com and avid online bargain hunter. She is also managing editor of Webopedia.com.
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