Yeah, mebbe. It’s driving me nuts. Once again I’m late getting a sales report to an artist on my label because pulling together the numbers from iTune Store is as much fun as pulling teeth. So operating on the principle that there’s other small labels out there dealing with the same issues, I would certainly be interested in talking to some other small labels to see whether there’s a market for a web application that would do all the legwork here.

Struggling artists waiting to get paid because iTunes is so bad at reporting on sales

Here’s the problem I face and you probably face too: iTunes’ label management site  site spits out reports that are one big tab-delimited text file per label, per month, per territory. That’s about as friendly and helpful as being handed a bag of bolts and a wrench and being told to build your own train each time you buy a subway ticket.

If i were bigger than i am (i can dream, can’t I?) i might have 10 artists, each with 2 albums, each comprising 12 tracks, each of which might also exist as a ringtone, music video, iTunes Plus or iTunes music file.  Consumers can buy single tracks or whole albums, so my monthly report (again, if i were bigger) might contain 50-100 or more rows. There’s a monthly report for each territory (US, Canada, Europe and UK, Australia, New Zealand and Japan.) Each file needs to be chunked up in Excel so I can generate reports for each artist’s management that include total iTunes sales for the month, and sales per album.

All that’s doable for someone who’s good with Excel, but here’s the thing: all the people who are good at Excel do NOT work in the music industry. The people who are good at looking stylish, maintaining vapid meaningless conversations at shouting level in a crowded bar, who picked on the kids who were good at Excel work in the music industry.

Large record labels who have their own accountsperson can get by OK, but there’s a large and growing number of micro-labels out there thanks to teh interwebs and Mac-based production software who can’t afford their own accountsperson.

Many labels report to their artists quarterly, so combining three months of reports across six territories, and then splitting them up per artist and per album is a huge buttpain.

In a perfect world, I’d have a website I could count on to take care of a lot of that text munging for me, that would let me spit out formatted Excel reports on any of the variables of artist, album, media format, territory, date range, etc. All I would need to do would be to upload my text files I’ve downloaded from iTunes’ label site. Maybe it could even hookup to MYOB and Quickbooks and straight into sales ledgers.

I think labels would love having an archive of reports saved on the site they could check back on at any time, and pump out reports tracking trends in sales across different time periods. Don’t get me started about pretty graphs.

On the input side, there’s also the question of iTunes Producer, the Mac-only software that you must use to upload your media and metadata to iTunes. It’s a very ordinary app indeed, clearly something with no developerwidth at Apple as it would be considered subpar as shareware if it were out there in the public eye. A website that helped labels create and manage the metadata and media before uploading it via iTunes Producer could also be very helpful.

And this is all just iTunes. Sure, they’re the biggest mainstream retailer but there are a lot of other online retailers to manage data in/out of. But iTunes would be a great start!

So before I go hire a developer and build a web application that does this, can I get a second opinion from other small record labels? Let me know what you think of the idea? Whether it might be helpful enough that you’d consider paying a small amount to access it? Whether there are other problems you face that this software could solve?

Thanks!