Alt have signed up a distribution deal in the UK and US, with online download label Indmill.
As Indmill put it themselves:
From the moment we had the idea for Indmill it stuck. Selling music for next to nothing and giving almost everything to the artist made perfect sense. But why wasn’t everyone else doing it?
It used to cost a lot of money to get music in the shops but, to paraphrase a famous poet, the times are a-changing. Music can now be recorded and made available for download without the expense of paying a record company, advertising agency, manufacturer, agent, manager, lawyer or retailer.
With most of these costs out of the window music is getting cheaper … but not cheap enough to persuade a generation of fans to pay to fill their iPods. Unless someone figures out how to pay artists to record music, well … they might not bother.
Contrary to current belief, there is a solution. Indmill customers pay ludicrously low prices for music they can keep and 90% (excludingVAT on EU sales) of the revenue goes straight back to the artist. We take a 10% cut (excluding VAT on EU sales), of which 5% goes to a charity nominated by the artist. The artist can, if they wish, give a cut to charity. The customer also gets the chance to donate something to charity at the checkout. Everyone gives something, everyone gets something. Everyone’s happy.
Indmill sells whole albums and singles as MP3 files (because it’s currently the most widely accepted format) encoded at 256 or 320Kbps (because 128Kbps just doesn’t cut it through decent speakers) and at a price you won’t find anywhere else (without breaking the law). Oh, and we sell whole albums and singles rather than individual tracks because - well that’s how the artists wanted them to be listened to. If you don’t want some of the tracks you’ve downloaded, delete them.
Alt feel that Indmill reflect the integrity and ethics of their music and a percentage of each sale of every track will be donated to Save the Children.
