One IODA

Even in beta, Promonet has attracted a number of podcasters who enjoy having another source of music with no licensing headaches. Dailysonic (www.dailysonic.com), which co-founder Adam Varga describes as "an NPR for hipsters," combines news, humor, and a music spotlight in a roughly 50-minute show, three times a week. It currently counts 2,000 downloads per episode, and Varga says that up to a quarter of his music comes from IODA. "For me, the most important thing is content. The labels they have in their catalog are great labels with great artists, and I also think that [the catalog] is curated well."

"It's a great thing to have cleared music, and it's great that IODA's doing that. It certainly encourages the free distribution of music," says Chris MacDonald, founder of the leading indie podcast network Indiefeed.com, which sees 350,000 to 400,000 downloads a month. But, he adds, "It's not the primary reason we come to IODA. We come to IODA because they have great content."

If Promonet can tie bloggers and podcasters more tightly to labels without cutting into the overall freedom of the practices, it'll be a coup. But that's only one of IODA's goals for the year. While the company made its name working with indies, Arnold has plans that go beyond the indie space — and even beyond music.

For example, IODA carries large back catalogs of older and international music, and it'll continue to expand both. "There's no catalog out there that isn't going to have some value online," says Arnold. "The goal certainly for everybody in this business — maybe not everybody, but certainly most of the very large all-inclusive stores — is to host all the content in the world, and make it available." Last September IODA struck a major deal with the China Record Corp., the Chinese government's oldest and largest record company, to license a deluge of music: 60,000 releases spanning some 5,000 years of music history, with recordings that date back to the 1920s. That's a lot to sift through, and "we won't be building recommendation engines ourselves, but we will be building and maintaining as rich a set of metadata as possible to help make it easy for other people."

The other big push for this year will be video content. "With YouTube or Google Video, anybody can upload anything," says Arnold. "There is no filter there, which is essentially the way that music was in the late '90s — everybody in the world was putting up an MP3. And that's cool. That should exist. But at a certain point, you want to go out and start to create a little bit of an economy and help these artists earn some money off of their work. And that's where the stores started to come in, that provided this convenience and filtering and editorial, and I think the same thing will happen with video." He expects that IODA will start with music videos and independent shorts, and gradually work up to feature-length films.

Ironically, IODA's growth through working with the little guy illustrates one of the central rules of digital distribution: There is no indie. As an aspiring artist or label owner, you may think you can start small, but from day one you're in a worldwide market. All of the artists, labels, and distributors — new and ancient, savvy and naive, multinational and minuscule — enter a digital music space that is instantly global, and that instantly confronts them with hundreds of decisions. IODA has to serve as a kind of switchboard in the middle, to pass the music around and to collect as many leads as possible. And let's not forget: It also has to adapt and grow every week — sometimes every day.