"There ain't no stupid question that we ain't thought to ask." - The Mendoza Line.

WPRB old-timer and My Pal God Records impresario Jon Solomon spins records tonight in Philly. Yeah, it's way too late for most Clicky Clicky readers to get there. But the picture makes the link worth clicking through anyway. The March update to the MPG web site also answers a question we've had for a while about some indie music available on EMusic and ITunes.

At EMusic in particular, certain labels, MPG for example, have their names listed next to their available releases with "/IODA" appended to them. Turns out IODA is the Independent Online Distribution Alliance, an operation run by former Listen.com, Wired, 75 Ark, CDuctive and Napster doods. They get in between content companies and digital distribution outfits and handle admin and whatnot. We wonder what kind of revenues they do. Perhaps Cable Elk knows. But here is some chicken scratch to get us in the ball park.

According to IODA's web site, "IODA receives a portion of the license royalties paid out by the services in exchange for ongoing rate negotiation, catalog encoding and data management services, precise and comprehensive reporting, and the administration and distribution of royalties." An earlier sentence suggests they are talking about the sound recording royalty. So basically they get some pocket change for every sale of a song they distribute. This adds up quickly, we are sure, but the size of the payment per song is likely pretty small. We've lost all the mental faculty to calculate these things as we probably could have back when we represented with the Noize. Plus it sounds like the royalty rates for the various types of rights purveyed by the different digital distro outfits are all over the map. But we know that we pay $10 per month for 40 downloads from EMusic, which means EMusic grosses a quarter per song. Who knows how many different ways that quarter gets split up, but we'll bet anybody who walks away with a whole nickel probably feels pretty lucky.

Related: Coolfer points us to a very interesting and somewhat provocative piece in the Guardian that states only 4% of legally downloaded music is purchased by women. What's it all mean? The article also claims (and we have no reason not to believe them) that the UK has the highest per capita music consumption, as well as the highest rate of ownership of Ipods and MP3 players. Anyway, it doesn't answer any questions, which is frustrating, but there are lots of interesting bits and pieces scattered throughout. Anyway, in related news, Yahoo just announced this evening it is launching its own music subscription service.

Splendid kicks the tires on the new A-Sides record.

That is all.