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Frequently Asked Questions How can I sell my music or movies through Lightning Content Distribution? We are available to accept your project whenever you decide to do so. You can contact us at distribution@lightningcd.com and a representative from our distribution team will contact you as soon as possible. This individual will provide you with all of the information you will need and assist you in gathering these things. They will be your representative and contact point, and act as a dedicated account manager for you. Should you need anything during the process of listing or at any time in the future your representative will be able to provide you with any answers or materials that you may need. The short list of things that Lightning will need to begin the immediate distribution of your project is:
Can I add a .pdf, .jpg, bitmap or other file type with my artwork for customers who might want it? When Lightning accepts a project for distribution we automatically encode your project along with any cover artwork you provide to us. The Lightning Disc Creator automatically offers to print a label (complete with a table of contents) and any cover art that you submit to us with your project. Once a customer has purchased your project, they get not only a full audio quality CD or full-featured DVD, but also any artwork that you provide. We also have the ability to deliver "enhanced CDs" containing both audio and data content, such as music videos or other multimedia. This technology can also be used to distribute PDFs or similar images of liner notes and jacket inserts along with any purchase of your works. As the ability for home users to print out fold-out posters or booklets is still relatively limited, due to the limitations of home printer technology, we believe the best way for you to get your artwork to your fans is directly through the Lightning Disc Creator. How can I get my music or movies listed faster? One of the things that causes some delay in getting your music or movie listed with Lightning is the time necessary to produce high quality scans of artwork for any print collateral provided with your CD or DVD. Though we are eager to put your music or movie online, we pride ourselves on giving the customer the full quality artwork as well as full quality music and movies - and so we take great care with the art we make available. We know you care about the quality of your packaging and presentation material as well, so we have developed a tool to let you upload pre-prepared art files to us directly. This ensures that there is no loss of quality between your digital originals and the finished product - as might otherwise be introduced by the process of pressing the original CD or DVD and scanning and encoding at our end. This tool is the Lightning Art Packager - a piece of software for Windows PCs (Windows 2000, 2003, or XP) that permits you to group together and upload a set of digital images comprising the print collateral for your CD or DVD. This can include cover art, tray card, case insert or booklet, and of course disc art. Great! How do I get the Art Packager? To utilize this software, simply download from the below link and execute the installer. The Lightning Art Packager will install and be available from your Start menu. We have built the Art Packager to provide a wizard-style interface for you to select which art components you want to include with your media. Upon launching the Art Package, you can select either New Art Package to begin creating a new file, or Upload Art to upload an art package previously created but not yet uploaded. Once you select New Art Package, you are prompted to enter your contact email, the name of the disc, and the case format. Clicking "Next" will bring you to a screen where you will select which pieces of artwork you want to provide (and how many). Clicking "Next" again from here, once the artwork is selected, will prompt you to drag-and-drop the images necessary to fill out the art package - or you can use the Browse button to find them on your computer. Once these are selected, you may press Next and will be required to acknowledge that you have the rights to distribute this media, and then can click Next once more to complete the art package creation. You can create several art packages at once and then upload them all in a batch, or may upload them as they are created. A documentation file is included with this application.  What kind of advertising and promotion are you doing to promote Lightning and its artists? LightningCD's current advertising includes Internet, radio, and newspaper advertisements to make customers aware of the service. We are also doing targeted advertisements in publications and venues that cater specifically to musicians. LightningCD has become quite active in the sponsorship of local and regional events that feature musical performances and we hope to extend this in the future. In July 2003 we launched LightningCD with our first artist promotion concert at the historic Moore Theater here in Seattle, featuring four artists whose music is available through LightningCD. This was the first of our events which will be featuring local or regional LightningCD artists at local popular venues, initially on the West Coast and coming to other cities and towns soon. We are building a comprehensive marketing plan that will include a radio, newspaper and magazine presence, over time, as well as a plan to interact regionally with musical and consumer groups. However, our most important means of advertisment is you! As you probably know by now, LightningCD pays our artists for each and every sale that is made; our contract brings the artist 50% of the sales price for each CD or DVD sold, as a baseline. But an important means of bringing customers to the site is the referral system which is already a part of our contract with all of our artists. With this referral system you will have the chance to make more money from your CD or DVD sales just by putting a link on your web site that will link your fans directly to your albums at LightningCD. Not only will this save you time and effort of getting checks, mailing CDs or DVDs, replicating and storing the discs in the first place, but also for each sale that is made from this type of a referral the artist makes 60% of the purchase price! I press my own CDs or DVDs but I am considering this service as well...would there be a conflict? LightningCD's contract is completely non-exclusive and there would be no conflict whatsoever. We want you to do well with any project that you produce. We understand that there are many other options in this industry that you may want to use. Our contract will not interfere with prior or future agreements that you have made unless you have already signed an exclusive contract with someone else. There is a benefit to listing your project with LightningCD that should be mentioned. While you may certainly wish to continue duplication, this process can become expensive for anyone. As a LightningCD artist there is no need for you to send us any kind of stock or inventory. Our technology makes it possible for us to list your project and begin paying you with only one copy of your project. Because our customers actually create their final product there is no need for us to maintain a warehouse of CDs and DVDs. This results in a larger portion of each sale to be paid to our artists. It also means that you do not need to incur reproduction, storage or shipping costs to begin active distribution of your project through the Lightning Content Distribution catalog. Pressing a run of a thousand CDs with art and labels can cost several thousand dollars and DVDs are more; we can save you this expense. Or more likely, you will choose to have some CDs pressed and others sold through LightningCD, which will also save you money. How many CDs or DVDs do I need to send you? Where should I send them? LightningCD only needs one copy of your project to begin distributing your work nationally. Since our technology allows the fans to purchase and create their own full quality audio CD, we do not need to maintain an inventory. This will save you any money that you might otherwise need to spend on reproduction, storage, or shipping. All projects should be sent to our corporate headquarters: LightningCD Corporation 4707 Aurora Avenue North Seattle, WA 98103 Please contact your Artist's Representative for any questions regarding what paperwork and items you will need to have your project listed in the LightningCD catalog. (If you don't yet have an artist representative, please drop us a line at distribution@lightningcd.com and we'll get you in touch immediately!) Who determines how CDs or DVDs are priced? Our contract gives you full control over the suggested retail pricing of your project. We will respect your decisions to list your projects at the prices that you wish. We do have a suggested pricing schedule for any number of different project situations. If you decide to add your project to our catalog we would suggest a SRP of $11.99 for a full CD project. For other types of projects we suggest pricing either higher or lower than the $11.99 price point, depending on its size and your needs. This is only a suggested price and you are not, in any way, obligated to list your project for this amount. LightningCD Corporation does maintain the right to run coupon or discount marketing plans that might impact an individual sale of your project, from time to time. Currently, our marketing plans include promotional discount coupons that will provide $2.00 to $3.00 off selected albums. What impact does this have on my rights to the music or movie? It's your music - we're just giving you another way to sell it! You will maintain your rights to do whatever you wish with your project at all times. Our contract is non-exclusive, which allows each of the artists that we represent to pursue any other type of situation that may assist in reaching any goals that have been set personally or for the project itself. The LightningCD distribution contract allows us to make reproductions of your project for sale. We must have this right, signed by you, to allow us to allow even one sale of your project. We will never sell any individual track or project as a whole without this contract in place as a part of our commitment to keeping everything that Lightning Content Distribution does honest, helpful, open and legal. We also ask for rights to market and publicize your band and project as a part of our marketing strategy, as well as to excerpt clips of your music for preview purposes on our site. Is there a way for me to withdraw from LightningCD at any time? While we hope that our relationship with you will be a long happy and profitable one we do understand that in the course of things there may come times when an artist would want to change course. Perhaps your time on LightningCD has led to enough recognition that you have found a fantastic deal... but one that requires exclusivity. While we would hate to see anyone feel the need to leave, our contract provides for a 90-day "out clause" upon written notice. Once we receive your request to end our relationship, this 90 day period would begin. Once completed LightningCD would take your project out of our catalog. Your final check would be issued in the following month with your normal check run. Can I distribute my music or movies through other channels while affiliated with Lightning? Absolutely, Lightning Content Distribution's artist contract is completely non-exclusive. How much am I paid? Our standard agreement with our artists guarantees that you will never receive less than 50% of the sales price for every sale of your project. LightningCD also has an incentive program that is a part of this same agreement. If you, as an artist, would like to put a link to purchase your music through the LightningCD web site, we will pay you 60% of any referral sales made through that link. This is a free service to you and we will provide the necessary link to you if you wish to implement the opportunity to earn an extra 10% on every sale. What images can I use for the referral link? These icons are currently approved for use with this link:   When is payment calculated? Each month Lightning will run reports for the preceding calendar month. These reports will be calculated by the 15th of the month. How regularly do I receive checks and reports on sales? How are payments calculated? Any month in which your total payment exceeds $20.00 U.S. you will be paid on or about the 15th of the following month. In months where the $20.00 U.S. is not met or exceeded LightningCD will roll that month's earnings in to the following month. You will always be paid within three (3) calendar months of any sale, even if this falls below the $20 threshold. As we have described, your monthly payments are based on how many CDs or DVDs were sold and where they originated. (The LightningCD contract guarantees that for each sale you make we will pay you a minimum of 50% of the price of every sale. Should you bring sales through your web site you will receive an additional 10% of that net.) If you have reached $20.00 in sales profits, we will generate reports to show you your total sales and total profit. With this report it will be our pleasure to write a check to you, processed and paid promptly. As an example, let us say you were to decide to list your CD within the LightningCD catalog at $11.99. When that CD sells for $11.99 you get 50% ($6.00)... no exceptions, no catches. If that same sale came as a referral from your band web site you would get 60% instead of 50%. If you have any questions or concerns regarding anything within our contract please feel free to contact your Artist’s Representative or contact our offices directly. How can I audit records of sales if desired? We will send a copy of our reporting to you with each check, for your records. This will allow you to track your sales numbers as well as your profit. We will be available for any questions you may have regarding any payment you receive. Can you just take the setup fee out of my initial sales? The administrative fee that is a part of our contract is exactly that. It is a one time fee that we ask for to process your project, to cover the startup costs of making your project available for sale. It covers encoding the music, scanning cover art, validating that the audio is reproduced correctly, generating the preview audio clips so that fans can listen to music snippets, storing the necessary content on our servers, putting up your press kit, and many other things. Please remember, too, that this fee also covers some of the costs of generating your reports, tax reporting, reporting to Soundscan or other services, postage, and other administrative costs for the duration of your contract. When we receive your project, we first encode your music using our secure content replication tools. These allow us to protect your music during distribution over the Internet, provide the same kind of high quality audio to the customer that they'd get when buying a CD in a store, and ensure that the customer will be getting the music they want and expect. We then take your CD art and cover art and process that in to our system. Your information is then entered and correlated back to your project. If you provide us a press kit, inclusion of this will also be covered in this fee. We generate preview audio clips for each track, allowing customers to get a sample of your music before purchase. Once this is complete, we verify that the disc has correctly encoded, the imagery matches and that the audio tracks are up and ready for preview. Each month in which your project sells more than $20.00 (or any cumulative months in which you do) LightningCD processes all of your accounting, provides a report of your sales and earnings, stores this information and tracks your tax information and prepares your check. We will mail it to you, along with your reports each time a check is issued to you. The fee that is a part of our initial contract is simply to cover some of the charges that LightningCD incurs while preparing your project for national distribution. While we understand your desire to use the sales of your CD to cover this cost, LightningCD incurs many costs as we prepare your projects to be added to our catalog. You will never be charged an additional fee for things such as changes to your bands biography, address changes, line up changes or any other changes to the terms, representatives, or specifics of your contract. What verification does LightningCD need of my rights to the music or movies? When you sign our contract you are stating that you have the rights to distribute the projects that are being submitted. If you are not the band or individual named on the project and in the contract you will need to provide a contract, signed by the artist, showing that you have the legal right to sign a distribution contract on their behalf. In what format does one submit music or movies to LightningCD? LightningCD will need an actual CD or DVD copy of your project delivered to us before we will be able to list you in our catalog. We only need a single copy due to our delivery method to your fans. We maintain this copy in our offices as a back-up for your project. Please remember that LightningCD can only produce the quality of the CD that we get. If you are able to provide a mastered copy to us, your final product will be of higher quality. Similarly, for DVDs, we need the actual DVD copy of your project. Can I find out who bought my CD or DVD? To address fan and customer concerns regarding privacy we will be unable to provide you with a list of individuals who purchased your project. We will be supporting band bio/press kit pages that will be tied to your projects. We suggest that you might want to ask fans to join your mailing list through this link. Can my CD or DVD page include a link to my website? Each of your projects will be listed in the LightningCD library individually. They will all be cross-referenced to make it easier for your fans to find all of your work. While the individual links to each of your projects will be unable to accommodate information outside that about the specific project, we will be supporting band biography or press kit pages. If you wish for your information to be linked to your project you will need to provide a copy of this information when you submit your contract. How do I send you additional tracks for a CD I've already set up with you, and what does it cost? When you decide to list a project with us there is a one-time fee of $39.95. This fee helps to cover the cost of encoding your project on to our servers to best protect your copyrights. Because a change to an existing project would require us to re-encode your project we would need to treat the addition of tracks to your project as a new project, in its entirety. Likeiwise, if you want to produce a "special edition" of your DVD, we would need to treat this as a new project. Can I sell individual tracks through LightningCD? Fans can use the "build your own CD" feature to select tracks from a variety of albums. If you really wanted to, you could give us a CD with just one track, but we (and your fans) would prefer to have a larger album. I work with several other artists; how does LightningCD handle payments in such cases? We will be more than happy to handle this and we are set up to do so. We will still issue you a monthly check as we do for all of our artists. Your reports will be a bit more involved though. Do I have any contractual obligations to LightningCD? As with all contracts the answer to this is yes. You will need to designate a band representative to be the point of contact for your group. This representative will be responsible for keeping LightningCD up to date on things like line-up changes, additional project contacts and things of that sort. LightningCD will need a designated individual, as chosen by you, to receive and be responsible for proper disbursement of your monthly payment, as well. If you or your band are incorporated we can issue a check to the band, directly. Federal law requires us to have either a business tax ID number or a social security number in order to issue any payments. This representative will be authorized to make any changes to the information that LightningCD maintains. We will also ask you to provide us with the suggested retail pricing or your project. Deciding on this number is entirely up to you. If you would like assistance in calculating this figure, your LightningCD distribution representative will be glad to help. Can I receive payments through alternate means, such as wire transfer? Right now LightningCD is equipped to handle payment by check only. We are looking in to and making plans to be able to make direct deposit available to you. Do you have any online 'e-tailers' or brick and mortar retailers set to sell the music that you carry? In July 2003 LightningCD officially launched it’s first distribution point, which is the web site available at http://www.lightningcd.com. We are a fully functioning 'e-tailer' with the ability to fully support our artists. We are looking forward to building out a new way to distribute music to benefit artists everywhere. Our future development plans include the development of many different forms of this technology. This will allow us to move from the web site concept into additional venues that would include, but not be limited to, actual 'brick and mortar' retail opportunities. Stay tuned! If I am also under contract with a label or studio, who handles the financial arrangements between us? That is, are funds owed to the label pre-deducted from received funds? If your label has distribution rights to your project it is likely that we will need to work with your label to be certain that we don't breach any agreement that you already have in place. We are glad to work directly with your label to set up payment arrangements that will allow us to begin our relationship with you. If you have an agreement that gives exclusive rights of distribution to a label we MUST work with your label directly. In both cases LightningCD would be obligated to pay the individual who currently holds the distribution rights for the project. LightningCD can issue only one check for payment, each month, per artist. In any case where a label holds the distribution rights and has a binding contract with you, we would be obligated to pay your label who would then be obligated to pay you according to your agreement with each other. Am I required to have an association with the RIAA in order to be listed with LightningCD? There is no requirement of any kind for you to be affiliated with the RIAA. If I am not required to hold an RIAA association, am I implicitly paying for the affiliation of others? (That is, are any agreements between LightningCD and the RIAA paid as a whole or based on the individual artist in question?) How about other agencies? No - strictly speaking, the RIAA is for record companies that create and sell music under their own brand, and though we distribute and retail music, we're not a record company in that sense. You are welcome to be affiliated with the RIAA either individually or through a label, but if you decide that you do not wish to, you will not be charged for the association of others. That being said, each artist who wishes to be associated, via bar code, to reporting agencies (such as Soundscan) will be responsible for the purchase of their own bar code. Likewise, if you decide that you do not wish to, you will not be charged for the affiliation of others. Is there any thing that would prevent me from listing my projects with LightningCD? Our contract is completely non-exclusive, so there would be no conflict on our side that would prevent you from deciding to distribute through LightningCD. However, if you are already under a contract for distribution with a label or some other distribution situation you should be certain to read that contract to be certain that placing your project with us would not violate any outstanding contracts. If you sign a contract with LightningCD you are stating that you have the right to enter in to the agreement with us and that there are no third party issues that would prevent our association. What mechanisms exist for consumer feedback on music or movies stored on LightningCD? The LightningCD web site includes a review system, for purchasers and fans alike, to enter comments about each of your projects. Over time you will see a history of comments for your project develop on the site, itself. With this feedback we will be able to provide you with real-time access to comments, suggestions and compliments as they are entered by our mutual customers simply by opening your browser to the LightningCD site and selecting your own projects.. We hope that your fans will all take the time to tell us what they liked best about your music. I have a good idea for something you should do... who do I suggest it to? We are offering an opportunity to become a part of our artist advisory group to artists who wish to be a part of this very exciting time and who choose to make their projects available for distribution through the LightningCD service. The suggestions and issues that this core group are identifying are a great piece of how we will make our decisions regarding what features and additional services we will be able to offer. As a part of this group, you will have the chance to tell us exactly what is most important to you. Please let us know if you would be interested in being part of this, by contacting your artist representative. If I wish to provide a limited coupon or general temporarily reduced price on my CD, how do I do so? Any time you wish to change the price on your project your distribution representative will be available and happy to assist you. There is a simple form that we will need to fill out and have on file before we are able to make this adjustment. We require this form to be absolutely certain that it is you or your representative that has authorized the pricing or other change. Who do I contact for issues regarding LightningCD's website? Who do I contact for issues regarding my interaction with LightningCD? For any questions or issues regarding an existing account we suggest that you contact your distribution or artist's representative. These individuals should be able to assist you with any and all issues regarding your account. We always welcome your feedback regarding the site and we have set up a specific address for you to use if you wish to make suggestions or comments about the LightningCD site - please feel free to contact us at feedback@lightningcd.com. If you wish to contact us regarding the distribution of your music please contact our distribution team at distribution@lightningcd.com -- we will get back to you as soon as possible. If neither party cancels it, how long does my contract with LightningCD last before renewal/renegotiation? Our contract with you is indefinite. Depending on your state of residence this may be altered by state law. There are some states that do not allow for indefinite contracts, in these states we are required to follow state law and limit the time of your contract in accordance with your law. Do you report your sales to SoundScan or any other reporting programs or agencies? We do have the ability to do this type of reporting and we are set up to handle your projects should you desire tracking of sales to be reported. If you already have a bar code that will allow us to report your sales we can enter that information with your project. If you do not currently have a bar code, we can provide you with one for $49.95. You may obtain the current distribution contract in Adobe Acrobat format by emailing us at distribution@lightningcd.com. |
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