Dear artists, labels, music people and fellow humans. As a little “we are sorry” for the February reports being delayed this month we have paid out the March reports earlier than scheduled. You can see these payments and stats in your account page right now.

We know that getting your sales reports on time is important to you and hope this initiative will go some way to compensate for the inconvenience caused by the delays in last month’s reports.

From now on its business as usual though and we will return to our regular reporting schedule. If you need reminding of exactly what this involves you can get a full overview under the “Sales reporting” section on our FAQ page.

Dear Record Union users.  We would like to inform you of a new payment routine which is now in effect. This new routine will involve payouts from your account page being temporarily disabled at the end of every month while new royalty reports are being processed.

The reason behind this new routine is a problem that can occur when a user pays out their account balance at the same time as a report is being processed by our reporting system.

To avoid this we will “switch off” payouts while our team work on uploading new batches of sales reports. This means you will see the sales information appear on your account straight away like before, but will have to wait until we have process all the reports before you can pay this money out.

The amount of time payouts will be disabled will depend on how fast we are able to process the new reports, but shouldn’t be more than 2-3 days.

If you have any questions or concerns about this, please get in touch with info(at)recordunion.com.

If you are a Swedish artist, head over to The Next Big thing website…now! They have just launched their biggest competition ever with some truly mind blowing prizes. We aren’t kidding! Here is what is on the line:

- A live performance at Way Out West festival

- The possibility to record a single at Kingsway Studio with Producer Mikael Axelius

- A promotion campaign on Spotify for the recorded single

- A tour organized by Luger / Live Nation

Few, if any, music compeitions can boast these kind of prizes. Take part and start activating your fans!

The are a number of different websites dedicated to sharing Spotify playlists - however, none are quite as  thought through as the newly launched Tunigo. Directed at Swedish listeners right now, this website offers unmatched playlist discovery.

In a nutshell, Tunigo is a platform where everybody can import, share, tag and discover new music on Spotify. It is user generated, and beyond tagging your own playlists you can also sort them by different themes and occasions.

Small details are important - and the creators of Tunigo know this. The fact that you an “drag and drop” playlists from Spotify to import them on your profile is pretty cool - but not as cool as that when you click to play a song it will play directly from the Spotify client (no little pop-up window and “play” button). The tagging feature runs rampant, and once an artist, song or playlist is clicked fresh suggestions are never far away.

Beyond this effective environment from which to share, find and connect with music, Tunigo also offers a range of engaging editorial content from writers and music people. These are often in the form of “retrospectives” and relate music to the life experiences of the writer - a charming idea. You will also be able to keep up with the latest music news and gossip.

If you run an own label or are an indie artist you should definitely add some playlists here, sneaking in a few of your own songs. With the discovery potential Tunigo offers, you may just see the plays rack up.

Dear users. Just a quick note to inform you that our technical team are currently performing some work on our sales reporting system. This has meant we have had to temporarily disable payouts from your account page. The work is expected to be completed by the end of this week, and we sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this will cause. If you have any questions or would like to get in touch with us about this please contact support(at)recordunion.com.

We are proud to announce that we have now added Rdio to our list of distribution partners. We are really excited to add another super cool streaming service to our list of partners, and hope this will create more opportunities for you to reach out to fans and listeners.

About Rdio: Rdio is an unlimited, on-demand social music service created by the founders of Skype. With Rdio, users can listen to as many songs as they want, anytime, anywhere, and discover and share new music with friends and influencers. Rdio is available on a variety of platforms including web, Mac or PC desktop client, mobile devices such as iPhone, Android, BlackBerry and Windows Mobile 7,  and in-home devices like Sonos and Roku. Rdio launched in August 2010 and is currently available in the US & Canada.

Record Union will deliver our entire catalog to Rdio on Monday next week - if you for some reason would not like your music available on Rdio please get in touch with content(at)recordunion.com. Happy time!

Today Amazon has announced the US launch of their anticipated new cloud service. Essentially this service enables music listeners to store their music library “in the cloud” (The Amazon Cloud Drive). Once here they can access it from a number of devices, without having to actually transfer the music between the devices themselves using wires and those annoying USB cables. Convenient eh? Whats more is that any purchases made from the Amazon Mp3 store will automatically land in your cloud.

Once uploaded into the Amazon Cloud drive the music can currently be accessed from the web (via the Cloud Player) and on Android devices (via the Cloud Player for Android).

So, what does this mean for your as a music creator? Well, when Cloud Drive users buy your music on Amazon Mp3 it will automatically be accessible from both their computer and their Android devices. They can also buy music from either of these locations without syncing the devices themselves. In a sense they wont be downloading it at all - it will just be made accessible in their cloud. This added convenience (and lets face it, convenience is everything) is expected to drive music sales from the Amazon Store.

You can find the official press release here.

Did you know that in addition to the sales stats shown on your account page, you can also get even more detailed information about your digital sales? Well, guess what, you can!

As the sales information we get from our partners contains a lot of information it is difficult to present all of this information on your account page (Trust us, we have tried). This is why there is also a CSV report available to you. This goes into more detail than the information on your account page and can be a valuable tool when analysing how your releases have been sold and streamed.

How to get it

You can download the CSV report on your “Account Page”. However, it will look a little weird when you open it for the first time. This is because you need to reformat it. For Excell and spreadsheet geeks this should be easy as pie, but for us normal people here is what you need to do:

1) Open the CSV file in Microsoft Excel.

2) Select all the information in the first column. (Tip: Click the top  of the column).

3) Click the “Data” toolbar and then “Text to columns”

4) A Wizard will be shown. On “delimiters” click “Semicolon” and then “Finish”.

The CSV files should now be displayed as a nice, readable table.

We hope that those of you who have not checked out your CSV will now be rushing to do so. Its a great tool and will be updated every month when we process sales reports. Any questions, contact support (at)recordunion.com. Happy time!

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While some embrace the possibility to share their music freely via “illegitimate” channels, many find unauthorized file sharing a curse. However, protecting against the unauthorized dissemination of music is notoriously difficult and has caused some to give up altogether. Now, however, there are some pretty sophisticated ways of preventing music becoming available on channels not authorized by the owner. One of these is Muso TNT.

So, how does Muso TNT work? Well, Muso intelligently searches a constantly updated list of millions of websites which can potentially host or make available unauthorized content. They also work closely with file-sharing sites to ensure this content is removed quickly. What is especially useful is that it gives the flexibility to remove certain files while keeping others in place for promotional purposes.  This will result in making infringing files harder to find while also potentially boosting earnings by directing fans towards monetized channels.

For more information head over to the Muso TNT website, where they are currently also offering a 14 day trial.

Today Record Union artist Nomy has taken over the Spotify client homepage. This massive takeover is to promote his latest album By the edge of God which is now out on Spotify. Those of you on Spotify Free may even hear some voice and banner ads about his new album which is set to be one of his biggest yet. If you are a premium user you can even take part in a competition Nomy is running from his homepage.

Nomy has appeared on the global Spotify toplist before with his hit album “Song or Suicide”  - we are excited to say the least to see what this homegrown DIY artist can achieve this time around! Go Nomy, go, go, go Nomy!