Digital music distribution powered by FUGA » Features

FUGA Adds Digital Video Management To Platform

Rebecca — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 09:17:20 +0000

Lady Gaga’s have clocked up over a billion views, OK Go’s launched them into the public’s consciousness and for many they have become the dominant medium for consuming music. We are of course talking about music videos and in the digital age they are more important than ever.

With a growing variety of video on-demand services and the wide spread usage of hand held devices capable of playing video content, music videos provide a huge boost to an act’s profile and can also provide a significant revenue stream for rights holders.

Recognising this, content management and delivery platform FUGA has fully integrated music video delivery into their service. Rights holders can now upload and deliver encoded music videos using the same intuitive FUGA user interface they use for their audio content. Having revolutionised how labels manage their digital audio releases, FUGA are again leading the way in streamlining the management of digital video content.

Eliminating the need for content providers to submit videos via FTP drops and reducing time consuming email exchanges regarding the status of the video delivery process, labels will again be able to dedicate more time to marketing their releases than administering them.

Initially FUGA will deliver video content to iTunes, YouTube and Muzu tv with more services to be announced soon.

Said Bas Kruijssen, Black Hole Recordings, “The new video delivery service in FUGA has enabled us to send our music video’s over to iTunes and YouTube in the blink of an eye. The distribution of music video’s using FUGA is now just as easy as it is for audio releases. FUGA offers an automated system that saves us time which we can now invest in promoting our products”

Said Rebecca Driessen, FUGA: “Having the video workflow intuitively integrated into FUGA enables labels to quickly reach their online audience with video content. We expect the ability to use FUGA to easily submit videos for iTunes certified encoding and delivery as well as delivering videos to specific YouTube channels will be of considerable value to the content providers using FUGA to manage their digital operation.

The importance of “clean” metadata

Cesar — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 07:03:38 +0000

Dan Eno from the Future of Music Coalition, has done a great job at explaining the basics of metadata and why it is so important:

Well, as more and more of the music market migrates online, sales from services like iTunes or eMusic or Rhapsody or those yet to be created will represent a larger portion of total music revenues. Songs and albums are organized by these services according to their metadata, so it’s important that the cataloging be accurate. Otherwise, your new acoustic country record could get mistakenly filed in the alt-doom-emo-crunk genre and never sell a single copy.

And the problem is not only with genres, but also with artist and track names. Paul Lamere from MusicMachinery.com wrote last year about the many, many ways to spell “Guns N’ Roses”. Obviously, you would like your fans to find all of your music as easily as possible, so using the correct spelling is critical if you want to your online presence across all platforms to be a seamless experience, or in the words of Terry McBride from Nettwerk:

To make all of these applications work, you have to have really good metadata, which means that business has to focus its efforts on really good metadata. Rich metadata is going to work with all of these applications.

FUGA has specific features that will help you provide consistent, “clean”, metadata to all the online services that use your releases. For example, artist names are managed from a separate list and can’t be “just typed in”. It would be very easy to see if we have more than one spelling for a specific artist:

Screenshot of a managed list of artists

Before sending anything to an external service, FUGA does multiple other checks are on your metadata: presence of mandatory fields like Title and ISRC code, format checks for ISRC, UPC/EAN codes and checks for duplicates in your catalog, amongst many others.

Because of this feature alone we are always on the top list of preferred suppliers for the top online stores in the world.

Deliver video to iTunes

Rebecca — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 09:39:51 +0000

Within a few weeks you will be able to send your music videos to iTunes using FUGA.

To meet the iTunes video style guide, your music videos must adhere to the following quality parameters:

Video must be 15mbits/sec

No borders (padding) should be used in the video

iPod Video image by Alexandre Van de Sande

New FUGA Feature: Takedown

Cesar — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 13:49:23 +0000

Has your license expired for a specific release? Do you need to remove a specific release from a DSP? Then ‘Takedown’ is the feature you’ve been waiting for. From the release catalog, browse to (or search) the specific release you want to take down. Found it? Now, click on the red arrow pointing down on the same row. You will be presented with a list of the DSPs and labels that have received this specific release, and you can select which ones should get a ‘Takedown’ notification, or in other words you’ll be telling them that they are not allowed to sell that product anymore.

New FUGA Feature: Delivery queue prioritization

Cesar — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 13:44:57 +0000

This is one of this features that you’re not going to be able to see, but you’ll definitely notice. During the last months our customers have been putting our delivery queues through some heavy delivery-pounding. This meant that sometimes the queues were so full that important deliveries had to wait for a few extra hours. Well, not anymore. The delivery queues have been updated to “automagically” determine the priority of a release, and move it up and down the queue to insure timely deliveries.