Digital Supply Chain Partnership Reaches for the Sky

Independent music download company, ATSdigital and supply chain consultancy State of Flux have teamed up to review and look at the digital music supply chain.  ATS Digital, a newly launched independent music download site for leading  rock, dance, urban, pop and jazz independent labels was founded by Tony Burt (owner of Above the Sky, an online dance music retailer). And in this competitive environment  ATS digital is looking to State of Flux to assist them to gain an advantage over its competitiors. Tony Burt says "We have had a number of years in the industry and not only want to expand our business with this new company but to also face and shape the future of the digital downloads market"

State of Flux, a supply chain change consultancy offers a number of services across a wide range of industries and counts a number of FTSE 100 organisations as its clients. Managing Director Alan Day commented "We are always looking to expand and challenge ourselves and with the explosion of online music retailers, those companies that look at the most cost effective sourcing and distribution channels will ensure their position and security in the market place".

Plenty has already been written about the commercial successes of the Apple iTunes Music Store and other online music stores such as Napster and Sony connect, but how does an independant store get to compete with the major players in this ever increasing market of music downloads

Getting the music onto the on-line store is in itself a barrier to the online music market. It is more complicated then having CDs supplied to ATS from record labels, or even the artist themselves, and ripping and encoding the audio files into a downloadable format for public consumption. There's also the issue of metadata, or the data, which describes the music. Track names, lengths, artist's names and so on are perhaps just as important as the music itself. You wouldn't download a song or album without having knowledge of the music.

Enabling a CD-free distribution path not just for back catalogues but also the release of new material, and the speed of the supply chain are the challenges for the industry.  Direct delivery to the digital warehouses from the studios would giver quicker access to the digital files and allow the metadata to be built around a track sooner rather than later. This will ensure digital music providers compete with the illegal peer-to-peer file-sharing traders.

Added to this unique look at the digital music download industry ATS Digital also have other competitive advantages, a robust and secure infrastructure, multi-platform payment systems, choice of quality levels of downloads, exclusive and rich independent music content and the opportunity for consumers to download the track 3 times over a 24 hour period. Most of the major download sites do not combine all of these features on their sites.

ATS Digital believes they are in the right place at the right time and with this unique partnership they will achieve their goal of being the leading independent digital download site.

For more information or to download music go to www.atsdigital.com