Revenue stream

Here's an interesting statistic - although there's more-or-less acceptance that streaming royalties aren't massive, they still account for 22% of revenue at Beggars Group.

Also interesting: Cooking Vinyl's Richard Leach expects YouTube to become the label's most significant source of revenue.

eMusic waves goodbye to several indies

eMusic's unique selling point used to be that it offered a download home to the less corporate end of the label high street - a good first stopping-off point for what used to be known as indie.

Not any more. For even as eMusic adds a quarter of a million Universal tracks to its database, it's telling subscribers to grab indie stuff while they can:

As we prepare for the largest catalog addition ever to eMusic in the US - 250,000 new tracks! - and make it possible for similar additions in the UK, Europe and Canada, we want to be up front with our loyal indie fans and provide advance notice that music from Domino, Merge and the Beggars Group family of labels will no longer be available on eMusic as of Nov. 18, 2010 pending further discussion. Many of you who have downloaded or music or saved for later from these labels will be receiving an email shortly with these same details.

This is as heartbreaking to us as it is to you. Please know we have done everything we could to keep them from leaving. Forging deals with our label partners can be pretty complex. As many of you know, labels have come and gone over the years, and we hope to see these labels back soon. You can add your voice here to help us bring them back. For more info, see our FAQs.

In the meantime, we encourage you to get the music you love from these labels at a great price before November 18 - music from artists like Arcade Fire, Spoon, The National, Vampire Weekend, The xx, She & Him, Caribou, Titus Andronicus, and Deerhunter, to name a few.

We understand that you may not have enough downloads before your next refresh date to get everything you want. In that case, we invite you to get a booster pack.

Yes, you did read that right - eMusic are boldly trying to make extra sales off the back of dumping a lot of its core content. That shows they have chutzpah. Even if they don't have 4AD any more.

But does losing the sort of stuff that defined eMusic mean that it has somehow lost it's soul?

Do you know, eMusic are glad we asked that:

For those of you wondering if this means eMusic is losing its focus, rest assured, we're still the place you go to find the records that hover under the radar, records that represent clear artistic vision - and the records that we find inspiring on both major and indie labels, regardless of how many albums were sold. Let us prove it to you!

It's like listening to a paunchy fortysomething pretending to still be the guy he was in college - "nothing's changed, I still support social change; it's just sometimes I have to deny protesters' applications to march in Parliament Square from time to time."

Actual indie labels less than thrilled by 50% indie chart

The Guardian's Louis Pattison asks indie labels about the new rules for the Independent Chart.

They're not that impressed:

Allison Schnackenberg of Southern Records, which acts as an umbrella label for Dischord, Kranky, Crass Records and Ipecac Recordings, among others, describes the new rules as "an absolute con". The issue is the "50% or more" rule, meaning that labels can receive a significant chunk of major-label funding and still qualify as "indie". "It's turning the independent charts into yet another marketing ploy for major-funded ventures," she says. "They are blurring the lines to the point that the word 'independent' will be meaningless to the general public. One is either independent or not. You can't be 'mostly independent.'"

Stewart Green from Beggars is a little more welcoming, but has his doubts about indie as a concept:

"Without getting too philosophical, what does 'indie' mean anymore? It's been used and abused to represent a watered-down form of guitar music rather than a totem for original, innovative, challenging music. So work needs to be done to reposition what the term 'indie' actually means – it cannot be allowed to be a term lost forever to a genre of guitar music! The success of the charts and breakers chart will depend on coverage. They need to be embraced by media outlets and given the space to exist alongside the commercial chart. Perhaps only then we will stake a claim to a truly interesting, diverse and meaningful independent chart."

To be fair, though, Stewart, the reason why 'indie' became synonymous with thin-legged boys playing guitars and wearing black jeans is surely in a large deal because that's the sort of music which used to dominate the indie charts? Given that the new big idea is a chart, I wouldn't hold my breath for a change in what that means.

And, from a broader listener's point of view, is there any real value at all in having a term which identified music not by its genre, but by the structure of the company which released the track? I'm pretty convinced that the idea clung to by Sony, for example, that "being on Sony" means something to a consumer is a desperate fallacy; for people who get their music between Chris Moyles' monologues and out the rack at Tesco, what difference is knowing a Bon Iver record is selling more copies than a different album released by a small label really going to make to them?

Beggar my neighbours: 4AD swallows sister labels

As part of the crazy, new-frontier world of music labels, Beggars Group have decided to thin out the number of imprints they operate under, shuttering the venerable Too Pure and Beggars Banquest labels and transferring across artists under those banners to 4AD.

It used to be quite hard to get onto 4AD; now it turns out all you had to do was sign to Beggars and wait.

The Too Pure singles club, it seems, is going to continue, though, as they sent out a press release after the announcement of the mothballing of Too Pure. This Spring, they'll be launching limited-edition singles featuring Kaputt, Electricity In Our Homes, Die! Die! Die!.

Rough Trade swerves out of Universal's clutches

Sanctury Records have flogged their 49% stake in Rough Trade ahead of being taken over by Universal. Beggars Banquet have snapped up the portion, bringing the group into a family already including some of the more prestigious indieish labels in the UK, including Too Pure, 4AD and Wiiija.