Nimbit
Encyclopedia
Nimbit, Inc. is a Framingham, Massachusetts
-based company offering direct-to-fan sales, marketing, and career management solutions for independent artists and music labels
through Web
-based services. The most popular aspect of the Nimbit Platform is their Mystore application that gives users a storefront to sell music and merchandise on Facebook.
In April 2010 Nimbit announced that they were bringing on Bob Cramer as their CEO. Nimbit is part of a growing market of Direct-to-Fan
solutions. Nimbit offers three different account options, NimbitFree, NimbitIndie and NimbitPro. NimbitPro became available in April 2010 and offers the most comprehensive artist services. Clients include Cory Gunz
, Rusted Root
The Mighty Mighty Bosstones
, Suzanne Vega
, The Dead Milkmen, Vertical Horizon
, Lucky Ali
, and others.
artists) and independent record labels around the Direct-to-Fan
Music Business Model.Direct-to-Fan
gives musicians control over their music, fans, business and careers.
In February 2008, nimbitSKIN was released as an online storefront that was skinnable and could be custom brand
ed to any website's color scheme
. The nimbitSKIN was again aimed at independent artists, to give them their own web-store. Notable users of the nimbitSKIN include Tom Rush
, Carrie Newcomer
, Ellis Paul
, and Rounder Records
.
In September 2009, Nimbit MyStore for Facebook was released to take advantage of the social networking capabilities of Facebook
, giving artists fan marketing
, promotion
, and direct selling capabilities. Artists can sell both digital and physical products based on fan buying behaviors—and do so from the artist’s Facebook pages (Fan Page or Personal Profile). The goal of this is to give artists knowledge of what each fan buys, and let them retaining more of the profits.
for their music, know their fans, engage their fans and offer them appropriate products, and tools to help them build loyalty & brand around the artist.
and web services, warehousing and fulfillment, backend ecommerce and payment processing. http://www.nimbit.com/artist-services
to third party retailers such as iTunes
, Amazon
, eMusic
, Rhapsody
, and Napster
. One differentiator of Nimbit versus other digital distribution
is in the area of surcharges, Nimbit passes all of third party royalties
onto the artists and charges the same to distribute to one or all of the retailers. http://www.nimbit.com/solutions/digital_distribution
s, and other merchandise directly for their customers. Nimbit also handles all customer service and payment processing regarding any order placed though a Nimbit storefront. Nimbit's storefronts take major credits cards and paypal. Nimbit processes all orders, and handles all payouts, including splits. Nimbit also provides artists with credit card machines to process payments at shows/gigs.
and DVD
replication and short-run CD-R and DVD-R duplication. The service includes prepress graphic work, UPC (UCC-issued barcode), Electronic PDF graphic proof, and assembly and wrapping. Nimbit also provides printing services for posters, flyers, cards, and other promotional materials
, and email marketing tools as well as widgets
to implement on the artist's site
.
JSR Merchandising and Nimbit began a partnership in June 2010. This allows JSR clients to use Nimbit's direct-to-fan solutions, and it also allows Nimbit clients access to JSR's merchandising services. This gives artists on stop shopping for all of their touring and online needs.
Nimbit has also partnered with Amie Street
and other music companies and festivals
.
Massachusetts
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States of America. It is bordered by Rhode Island and Connecticut to the south, New York to the west, and Vermont and New Hampshire to the north; at its east lies the Atlantic Ocean. As of the 2010...
-based company offering direct-to-fan sales, marketing, and career management solutions for independent artists and music labels
Record label
In the music industry, a record label is a brand and a trademark associated with the marketing of music recordings and music videos. Most commonly, a record label is the company that manages such brands and trademarks, coordinates the production, manufacture, distribution, marketing and promotion,...
through Web
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...
-based services. The most popular aspect of the Nimbit Platform is their Mystore application that gives users a storefront to sell music and merchandise on Facebook.
In April 2010 Nimbit announced that they were bringing on Bob Cramer as their CEO. Nimbit is part of a growing market of Direct-to-Fan
Direct-to-Fan
Direct-to-Fan is a business model used by independent musicians, independent music labels, music marketing professionals, promoters, and others in the music industry...
solutions. Nimbit offers three different account options, NimbitFree, NimbitIndie and NimbitPro. NimbitPro became available in April 2010 and offers the most comprehensive artist services. Clients include Cory Gunz
Cory Gunz
Peter Cory Pankey, Jr. is an American rapper, better known by his stage name Cory Gunz. He is the son of rapper Peter Gunz, member of the rap duo Lord Tariq & Peter Gunz, and cousin of fellow rapper Junior. Gunz is currently signed to Young Money Entertainment, Cash Money Records, After Platinum...
, Rusted Root
Rusted Root
Rusted Root is a band from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania known for their unique fusion of acoustic, rock, world and other styles of music, with a strong percussion section that draws from African, Latin American, Native American, and Indian influences...
The Mighty Mighty Bosstones
The Mighty Mighty Bosstones
The Mighty Mighty Bosstones are an American ska punk band from Boston, Massachusetts, formed in 1983. Since the band's inception, lead vocalist Dicky Barrett, bassist Joe Gittleman, tenor saxophonist Tim "Johnny Vegas" Burton and dancer Ben Carr have remained constant members...
, Suzanne Vega
Suzanne Vega
Suzanne Nadine Vega is an American songwriter and singer known for her eclectic folk-inspired music.Two of Vega's songs reached the top 10 of various international chart listings: "Luka" and "Tom's Diner"...
, The Dead Milkmen, Vertical Horizon
Vertical Horizon
Vertical Horizon is an American alternative rock band formed at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. in 1991. The band is best known for a string of hits in 1999 and early 2000s, including "You're a God", "Everything You Want", and "Best I Ever Had ". Their most recent album, Burning the...
, Lucky Ali
Lucky Ali
Lucky Ali , born as Maqsood Mehmood Ali , is an Indian singer songwriter, composer and actor. Lucky is best known for his soulful but strikingly simple ballad-style singing and melodious voice.-Biography:...
, and others.
Products
Nimbit creates solutions for independent musicians (indieIndie rock
Indie rock is a genre of alternative rock that originated in the United Kingdom and the United States in the 1980s. Indie rock is extremely diverse, with sub-genres that include lo-fi, post-rock, math rock, indie pop, dream pop, noise rock, space rock, sadcore, riot grrrl and emo, among others...
artists) and independent record labels around the Direct-to-Fan
Direct-to-Fan
Direct-to-Fan is a business model used by independent musicians, independent music labels, music marketing professionals, promoters, and others in the music industry...
Music Business Model.Direct-to-Fan
Direct-to-Fan
Direct-to-Fan is a business model used by independent musicians, independent music labels, music marketing professionals, promoters, and others in the music industry...
gives musicians control over their music, fans, business and careers.
Direct-to-fan dashboard
Nimbit artists use an online dashboard to see and manage their music business. This includes sales information, fan information, marketing promotions and results, storefront results, central product catalog (e.g., digital and physical music, merchandise, eTickets), central content management (e.g., band profile and gigs). This allows products and content to be entered once then viewed and changed in one place.Sales
Nimbit provides storefronts for Facebook, artist websites, blogs, and Nimbit's own music discovery site.In February 2008, nimbitSKIN was released as an online storefront that was skinnable and could be custom brand
Brand
The American Marketing Association defines a brand as a "Name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller's good or service as distinct from those of other sellers."...
ed to any website's color scheme
Color scheme
In color theory, a color scheme is the choice of colors used in design for a range of media. For example, the use of a white background with black text is an example of a basic and commonly default color scheme in web design....
. The nimbitSKIN was again aimed at independent artists, to give them their own web-store. Notable users of the nimbitSKIN include Tom Rush
Tom Rush
Tom Rush is an American folk and blues singer, songwriter, musician and recording artist.- Life and career :Rush was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. His father was a teacher at St. Paul's School, in Concord, New Hampshire. Tom began performing in 1961 while studying at Harvard University after...
, Carrie Newcomer
Carrie Newcomer
Carrie Newcomer is an American singer and songwriter.-Early life and education:Carrie Newcomer was born in Dowagiac, Michigan, and raised in Elkhart, Indiana. She attended Goshen College and received a B.A...
, Ellis Paul
Ellis Paul
Ellis Paul is an American singer-songwriter and folk musician. Born in Aroostook County, Maine, Paul is a key figure in what has become known as the Boston school of songwriting, a literate, provocative and urbanely romantic folk-pop style that helped ignite the folk revival of the 1990s...
, and Rounder Records
Rounder Records
Rounder Records, originally of Cambridge, Massachusetts, but now based in Burlington, Massachusetts, is a record label founded in 1970 by Ken Irwin, Bill Nowlin and Marian Leighton-Levy, while all three were still university students...
.
In September 2009, Nimbit MyStore for Facebook was released to take advantage of the social networking capabilities of Facebook
Facebook
Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. , Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as...
, giving artists fan marketing
Marketing
Marketing is the process used to determine what products or services may be of interest to customers, and the strategy to use in sales, communications and business development. It generates the strategy that underlies sales techniques, business communication, and business developments...
, promotion
Promotion
Promotion may mean:*Promotion *Promotion **Film promotion**Promotional campaign**Promoter **Promotional recording**Radio promotion*Promotion *Promotion - when a pawn reaches the eighth rank...
, and direct selling capabilities. Artists can sell both digital and physical products based on fan buying behaviors—and do so from the artist’s Facebook pages (Fan Page or Personal Profile). The goal of this is to give artists knowledge of what each fan buys, and let them retaining more of the profits.
Marketing
Nimbit Marketing includes fan capture, email marketing, fan messaging, and fan management. Nimbit's marketing products focus on helping musicians create demandDemand
- Economics :*Demand , the desire to own something and the ability to pay for it*Demand curve, a graphic representation of a demand schedule*Demand deposit, the money in checking accounts...
for their music, know their fans, engage their fans and offer them appropriate products, and tools to help them build loyalty & brand around the artist.
Download Cards
Nimbit designs, manufactures and processes Download Cards http://www.nimbit.com/services/downloadcards, which give fans access to the artists music. They can either be sold or given away for fan identification and marketing programs. Download cards are redeemable at artists' storefronts.Tickets
Artists can sell Tickets to their shows from their Nimbit storefronts. The event/show/gig information is entered once through the Nimbit Dashboard and then the etickets are automatically available on all storefronts.Services
Nimbit offers Label services including digital distribution to retail sites, CD and DVD manufacturing, custom merch, print services, graphic designGraphic design
Graphic design is a creative process – most often involving a client and a designer and usually completed in conjunction with producers of form – undertaken in order to convey a specific message to a targeted audience...
and web services, warehousing and fulfillment, backend ecommerce and payment processing. http://www.nimbit.com/artist-services
Digital distribution
Nimbit offers digital distributionDigital distribution
Online distribution, digital distribution, or electronic software distribution is the practice of delivering content without the use of physical media, typically by downloading via the internet directly to a consumer's device. Online distribution bypasses conventional physical distribution media,...
to third party retailers such as iTunes
ITunes
iTunes is a media player computer program, used for playing, downloading, and organizing digital music and video files on desktop computers. It can also manage contents on iPod, iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad....
, Amazon
Amazon.com
Amazon.com, Inc. is a multinational electronic commerce company headquartered in Seattle, Washington, United States. It is the world's largest online retailer. Amazon has separate websites for the following countries: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, and...
, eMusic
EMusic
eMusic is an online music and audiobook store that operates by subscription. It is headquartered in New York City with an office in London and owned by Dimensional Associates. As of September 2008 eMusic has over 400,000 subscribers....
, Rhapsody
Rhapsody (online music service)
Rhapsody is an online music store subscription service, launched in December 2001, and available in the United States only. On April 6, 2010, Rhapsody officially declared its independence from RealNetworks. Downloaded files come with restrictions on their use, enforced by Helix, Rhapsody's version...
, and Napster
Napster
Napster is an online music store and a Best Buy company. It was originally founded as a pioneering peer-to-peer file sharing Internet service that emphasized sharing audio files that were typically digitally encoded music as MP3 format files...
. One differentiator of Nimbit versus other digital distribution
Digital distribution
Online distribution, digital distribution, or electronic software distribution is the practice of delivering content without the use of physical media, typically by downloading via the internet directly to a consumer's device. Online distribution bypasses conventional physical distribution media,...
is in the area of surcharges, Nimbit passes all of third party royalties
Royalties
Royalties are usage-based payments made by one party to another for the right to ongoing use of an asset, sometimes an intellectual property...
onto the artists and charges the same to distribute to one or all of the retailers. http://www.nimbit.com/solutions/digital_distribution
Warehousing and fulfillment
Nimbit warehouses and fulfills (picks, packs, and ships) physical CDs, DVDs, Vinyl, t-shirts, posterPoster
A poster is any piece of printed paper designed to be attached to a wall or vertical surface. Typically posters include both textual and graphic elements, although a poster may be either wholly graphical or wholly text. Posters are designed to be both eye-catching and informative. Posters may be...
s, and other merchandise directly for their customers. Nimbit also handles all customer service and payment processing regarding any order placed though a Nimbit storefront. Nimbit's storefronts take major credits cards and paypal. Nimbit processes all orders, and handles all payouts, including splits. Nimbit also provides artists with credit card machines to process payments at shows/gigs.
Disc manufacturing (CD/DVD) / Promotional Printing
Nimbit does CDCompact Disc
The Compact Disc is an optical disc used to store digital data. It was originally developed to store and playback sound recordings exclusively, but later expanded to encompass data storage , write-once audio and data storage , rewritable media , Video Compact Discs , Super Video Compact Discs ,...
and DVD
DVD
A DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....
replication and short-run CD-R and DVD-R duplication. The service includes prepress graphic work, UPC (UCC-issued barcode), Electronic PDF graphic proof, and assembly and wrapping. Nimbit also provides printing services for posters, flyers, cards, and other promotional materials
Partnerships
ASCAP and Nimbit have partnered since 2004 to offer "ASCAP Web Tools" for ASCAP members. These tools included web hosting, designWeb design
Web design is the process of planning and creating a website. Text, images, digital media and interactive elements are used by web designers to produce the page seen on the web browser...
, and email marketing tools as well as widgets
Web widget
In computing a web widget is a software widget for the web. It's a small application that can be installed and executed within a web page by an end user. They are derived from the idea of code reuse. Other terms used to describe web widgets include: portlet, gadget, badge, module, webjit, capsule,...
to implement on the artist's site
Website
A website, also written as Web site, web site, or simply site, is a collection of related web pages containing images, videos or other digital assets. A website is hosted on at least one web server, accessible via a network such as the Internet or a private local area network through an Internet...
.
JSR Merchandising and Nimbit began a partnership in June 2010. This allows JSR clients to use Nimbit's direct-to-fan solutions, and it also allows Nimbit clients access to JSR's merchandising services. This gives artists on stop shopping for all of their touring and online needs.
Nimbit has also partnered with Amie Street
Amie Street
Amie Street was an indie online music store and social network service created in 2006 by Brown University seniors Elliott Breece, Elias Roman, and Joshua Boltuch, in Providence, Rhode Island...
and other music companies and festivals
Music festival
A music festival is a festival oriented towards music that is sometimes presented with a theme such as musical genre, nationality or locality of musicians, or holiday. They are commonly held outdoors, and are often inclusive of other attractions such as food and merchandise vending machines,...
.