Fuller Street Music and the lessons of the online music business...

The online music business is still evolving.

So the Fuller Street Music label is the home of a number of artists from Andy McWain (piano, eletric piano, composer), to Trine featuring Jim Robitaille, Rick Britto, and drummer Chris Poudrier, bassist Albey Balgochian and veteran drummer Laurence Cook, vocalist Sofia Koutsovitis, guitarist Kevin Frenette, and composer/guitarist Kareem Roustom, and others. It's been an interesting road from original art multi-panel digipacks, to full-color CD cardboard sleeves, to digital download-only releases.

The interesting progression from our first recording in 2003 to the present is the amazing shift in the music industry away from traditional CDs, record stores, and that former entertainment and music business model. For the whole industry the move to online music business is nearly complete, and compact discs are used mostly to get airplay, and to sell at live performances. Once radio stations have ported over completely, then the change will be permanent.

One issue is that the iTunes music store, and others, are selling music as mp3s at a lower resolution than these recordings were originally recorded, mastered, or released at. This is a huge problem! In some ways the music buying public has been buying sub-standard product for years. I wonder if Apple will ever correct this after the infrastructure can handle full audio quality streams, downloads, and purchases.