Meet Albert Delaney of OutboundMusic

Today we’d like to introduce you to Albert Delaney.

Thanks for sharing your story with us Albert. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
Well, my wife was running a songwriter’s group in the late 1990’s, she has been writing and performing since she was a teenager, and at the close of the meetings the talk always seemed to turn to how badly the music industry was ripping off artists. After hearing this for a while, we finally thought; why not do something about it ourselves?

OutboundMusic.com launched in Sept. of 2001. We accepted music from indie artists who controlled their own copyrights, we screened that music and if it was a good enough quality we streamed it over one of our Internet radio channels plus we sold downloads and mail order CDs. The artists received 85% of whatever we collected.

That’s still the model but we’ve added some other services; pitching our artists’ songs to other singers, also licensing music for film and TV and we still do songwriting coaching. Soon we hope to start a world-wide booking service.

Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Definitely not. We’ve been through three iterations of our website, we’re currently working on a fourth, and each one has been a challenge—especially since we’ve always been self-funded. It’s easier now but in the beginning even a seemingly simple task like streaming music involved some interesting work-arounds—funneling the music from stand-alone players through servers in our office and then over the Internet to a server farm in California and from there, out to the world.

We also made some unforced errors. Since we were always working on a shoestring, we made some compromises that in retrospect shouldn’t have happened. To save money and time, we accepted recommendations to not develop some features on our website that we really could have used. Also, like I said before, we pre-screen all the music that’s submitted and try to accept only the best. Sometimes that’s been hard and we’ve let some songs through that we really didn’t like. The lesson we’ve learned even if the artist is a friend, if the music isn’t up to our standards we must say “no”.

Alright – so let’s talk business. Tell us about OutboundMusic – what should we know?
Each year there is about 50,000 original music projects put out, think CDs or albums, 30,000 in the US alone. The major labels only push a few hundred or so of those and that’s what you typically hear on terrestrial radio. Of the many thousands left over most are not so good but there is a small percent that are good, even great and that’s what we try to find. We look for those indie artists (not with a major label) that are putting out great music and we work to get their music in front of an audience while assuring they are fairly compensated. For us the artist is not a commodity, he or she is a partner.

Is there a characteristic or quality that you feel is essential to success?
This can be said about most businesses; tenacity and knowing when to compromise and when not to—and most of the time not to.

Finally, bringing a scientific and analytic mind-set to the business.

Contact Info:

• Address: OutboundMusic.com
  16506 FM 529 STE 115, PMB 145
  Houston, TX 77095
• Website: OutboundMusic.com
• Phone: 281-859-6715
• Email: info@OutboundMusic.com

Image Credit: The first photo is of me in front of the Wake Shield Facility, a joint project between UH and NASA. I was on the science team for that project and controlled the satellite from the Johnson Space Center.

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