We use and promote a wonderful new software system called Indie Heaven. Indie Heaven is web site software that runs a record company, whether you're an individual artist, an indie, or a big operation. It's scalable from one artist, to thousands. It handles essential artist functions like press releases and mailing lists, and essential back office functions like business administration and money management.
Record companies have unique needs, Artists come and go, therefore web sites come and go. Indie Heaven can raise a new web site from scratch in less than 15 minutes, complete with basic content and a working Store, and have it instantly integrated with other Company web sites, with single sign on and system-wide roles and privileges.
Indie Heaven empowers the Artist. Record companies are generally too busy to do web site management, therefore Indie Heaven lets artists manage their own web sites, and makes it easy for them. The questions an Artist typically asks include things like "How many items have I sold in my store today?", and "Where's my money?". Indie Heaven performs real time royalty distribution as well as batch rollups on cycle, so artists can always see how much is pending and how much to expect in their next paychecks.
Depending on scalability, there is a one-time initial system configuration that may take up to 4 hours. (But no more). The initial configuration is based on how the business runs, for example what forms of payment it accepts, and what its policies are on things like refunds and credit card minimums.
After that, it's 15 minutes per artist for a new artist, and subsequently the artists can maintain their own web sites and their own stores. And it's so easy a ten year old could do it.
Indie Heaven pays careful attention to security, and to the legal issues around operating in the real world. It validates all user input, encrypts everything, and allows users to manage their own privacy settings. If anyone should hack into one of the databases, all they'll see is gibberish. We can't say the system is unhackable, but we'll say it would be more difficult than most to pilfer anything useful from it.
Indie Heaven provides baseline electronic interfaces to PayPal, USPS, and GeoIP, and optionally you can add direct interfaces to drop shippers and government agencies and anyone else who allows them.
There is a one-button yearly tax report, and all manner of reporting that record company executives like to see, and there is also online reporting for Artists and the Back Office, and an extensive communication system including system-generated list-based emails and direct interfaces to social media. There is also a full-featured advertising facility whereby web sites can generate and host internal and external ads. Your marketing people can generate promos from any Store item or combination of items, within or across Artists and web sites - it takes less than 30 seconds to create a "this week only, buy any two items, get a third free" promo, and publish it out to all the web sites in the network.
This is THE solution for indies, there isn't anything better. We know, because we're an indie ourselves, and we use Indie Heaven ourselves. It works! It puts professional promotional power into the hands of every artist.
Indie Heaven is available for licensing, on a per-seat or enterprise basis.
If you'd like a guided tour of Indie Heaven, please contact us here, and we'll show you the real time royalty splits, the Back Office, and the Admin pages, and you can see what happens when you bring new Artists on board.
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