Just a little update for those who are interested!
Things are moving ahead here at Andrými, we got ourselves a new accountant, as the last one was too hard to reach, and had all the legal/financial documents prepared for founding Andrými ehf. (ehf is the same as ltd in UK).
I've handed the paperwork over to the government, and paid the annoyingly hefty registration fee, now we should be a bonified legal entity in less than 48 hours!
I've also enlisted a lawyer acquaintance on starting a draft on our standard publishing rights agreement between Andrými and our artists. It will be a non-exclusive contract, based purely on artists getting as high a percentage as possible of the netto income from each sale. Right now as a rule of thumb we are planning on that to be around 50% (which through our webstore should be quite a large chunk), now I have yet to do some calculations based on manufacturing costs, operational costs and modestly expected sales, etc. but we honestly hope to be able to give artists as much as possible.
Another core objective of ours is to utilize the internet in promotion and distribution, seeing as how portable iPod players and the like have largely invaded the listening-space formerly dominated by radio, we think that offering free mp3's online for as much as 50% or so of each album is a solid marketing move for us, providing more penetration for the artist, thus increasing the listener base by a margin considerable enough so that album sales will more than make up for the free mp3's.
I have yet to meet an artist that was angry at people for listening to their music, paid for or not.
We are also starting the difficult process of securing connections to proper manufacturing firms, starting to locate possible distributors outside of Iceland, reading up on chart regulations, creating lists of appropriate music award committees to send to, etc.
I predict that we'll have a pretty good operation up and running in a few months, until then any advice and support is highly appreciated, if anyone is interested in helping us to do what we love, which is helping others to live off what they love to do, art.
(Ok, ok, I slipped into salesman-mode here for a minute, but hey, I guess I am the "suit" here ;-)
-Steinn
