Here is (below) the answer from "dear Julia" to my last mail.
This is quite enlightening about the viability of the business model - high advanced paiments, not enough sales to cover.
The solution to this seems quite simple to me:
The business for live audio music seems to be quite small, restricted to die-hard fans.
Every artist today have the necessary equipment to record their own shows; besides, their teams are the best placed to mix them the way they want it to sound... not too much flute please...
So, there is no need to engage huge fixe costs, like having a dedicated Simfy team following the tour with their own equiment, etc. Just let the artists provide the recordings.
Still, you need to distribute them. This can be done individually on each artist's web site, today it is very easy to build an e-commerce web-site; but still, there is an interest for a centralized, well-known purchasing plateform, to attract new customers and for the sake of convenience: istore, amazon, can do this perfectly.
Why not do exactly what Kindle Direct Publishing does now for e-books ? any author can now compile his own book, send it, and wait for money to come. Give 30% to the store, period. No fix costs. No retainers. No advanced paiments.
Am I dreaming that something like this could be possible in this century, or what ?
Hello <Herlock>,
great, that you have the backups.
You are not the only one who does not understand, why simfylive was closed. But the point behind that is, and this is something customers do not know, is that the contracts that allows us to record artists includie very high advance payment. At some point a company then has to check if the spend money gets back by selling concerts. After 2 yaears of live recording the managenet decided to closed that part.
Licenses always have a certain validation, after that time we are not allowed to sell them anymore. That is why you can not order any more concerts.
I will pass ypiur feedback over to the managent.
Greetings
Julia
_______
Customer Service
simfy AG
Vogelsanger Str. 187
50825 Cologne, Germany
Management Board: Gerrit Schumann, Georg Bergheim
Supervisory Board: Dr. Hendrik Brandis (Chairman)
Registered in Cologne, HRB 66600
