I have a really cool interview with Lee Parsons, the CEO of the digital distribution service Ditto Music, we talked both about the company and about his views on the future of digital music distribution. So here's the interview, I hope you enjoy it! Interview with Lee Parsons from Ditto Music AL: Andrea Leonelli LP: Lee Parsons AL: I'm really happy to welcome to the show this week Lee Parsons from the Digital Distribution service Ditto music. First of all for this episode I would like to talk on one side about Ditto music and on the other about your recent travels to various digital music events. I would also like to explore your position on the future of music online and on the role of the musician as well as that of the distributor. I'd like to start with Ditto music, so tell me a little bit about your background and how you started out. LP: Me and my brother were both in a band and this is probably five or six years ago. We got management and publishing really early on and also got a deal quite early on and we ended up doing our first ever gig at the Sony building in London at a massive showcase, full of people and with our management there as well. I remember our management asking us how many gigs we had done up to then and we said that was the first. And it just went downhill from there really. It was probably the worse gig I've ever been to and unfortunately I was part of the gig so that wasn't great. We just didn't get it, we did gigs with Razorlight and a lot of other bands but we never claimed our PRS back as no-one had told us what the PRS was. We made so many classic mistakes going forward and by the time we'd learnt what we were supposed to be doing our career was over. But what happened was that we wanted to put our single out since after all the work we'd done we had a large fan-base waiting to buy the song. So we looked at how to set up a record label and that took us three to four months because you have to go through Company's House for the company and then you have to register your CAT codes through the database. It was really complicated and we knew nothing about it at the time since we were musicians. Then in terms of distribution we went to our local shop and they said we couldn't put it in a shop until we had a record label. We said we did have a record label but they said they couldn't take us since we did not have enough content. So we decided to forget the shops and started looking into digital, this was about four years ago when it was still early days for digital. iTunes would not take our content as they said we didn't have enough to warrant having an account with them. So we used a site called Whip It at the time (it has actually gone bankrupt now, they were friends of ours). So we put the track out through Whip It and it got to number 80 in the charts due to the fans we already had and that's pretty much it, that was the end of our career. But what we did realize was that we had a system in place now so that any band could come to us and we could release their music within a day. We could put them out on our record label, put them on pre-release, we could get them SMS codes and release the music. We started getting more catalogue and deals in place with companies like iTunes, we now have deals with 400 to 500 services. In January 2007 we released the first ever unsigned artist into the Top 40, they are actually in the Guinness book of records as the first artist ever to get into the top 40 just on digital sales. So if you think back to three years ago the major labels still didn't see this change, while we realized it cost us nothing to put a digital release out and we didn't have to print the CDs. We were still working out of our bedroom at the time but we were in The Times, The Telegraph, BBC1 and we had another seven top 40s that year with unsigned bands. Since then it's just grown and grown, we have about 15,000 artists with some massive names, we have two offices in the UK and we are about to launch an office in the US. What I do for the most part is travel around talking about the music industry and how we can help unsigned artist. Even though we are a business and one of our goals is to make money me and my brother come from a band background so the main objective for us is to open new doors for bands that weren't there when we released our music. AL: And in terms of the technology that the company uses, who do you rely on to build your back-end infrastructure? LP: We have English staff and also an office in Romania -- you know what it's like with a technology company, you build something and then the next month you have to change it. You have to keep progressing at everything you do so that's a really important part of our business.

• published: 30 Aug 2013
• views: 13