Royalties and Payment

• What percentage of royalties do I receive from each sale?
• So break that down for me, just how are "transactional fees" calculated?
• So why does mycontent.com get 35% of the royalty for simply hosting my content?
• How often are Royalty payments made?
• Why are there minimum payment amounts? What if I want to cancel my account and have less than $25?
• Why are taxes required to be filed? What tax forms do I need to receive Royalty payments?
• How do I acquire a tax ID number?
• Why am I charged sales tax on purchases?

Seller Questions

• Is there a Quick Start Guide to help get started?
• What are my options for selling or licensing my content?
• How much can I charge for my content?
• How is my storage space calculated and how do I obtain more space?
• How do I get featured on the mycontent.com home page?
• What’s the difference between a subscription and a package?
• Why can't a package be modified after it has been made available for sale?
• As a content owner, what sorts of information can I get about traffic to my Storefront?
• How do I publish a "Live" event on mycontent.com?
• How does mycontent.com protect my media rights? What happens if someone claims my media?
• What types of DRM does mycontent.com use to protect my media?
• Why don't you apply DRM to downloaded content?

Site Questions

• What's the difference between a Standard and a Pro account?
• What information can I include in my profile fields?
• Why does some media have a high quality version and a standard quality version and some do not?
• Why are downloads only guaranteed for 30 days?
• Can I embed content on other sites and blogs? How do I make money from it?
• How do I cancel my account?
• How do I know my information is secure?
• Can subscription content be used on portable devices?
• Can I get a refund for a song or download I don't enjoy or did not mean to purchase?
• Does mycontent provide services to help with uploading media or managing my profile?

Technical Questions

• How can I format video for best results?
• What types of audio and video files does mycontent.com support?
• How can I format media thumbnails for best results?
• How can I make file uploads faster?
• How do I upload multiple media files?

Royalties and Payment

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mycontent.com wants to help artists uncover opportunities to monetize their entire music or video catalogue while allowing them to keep the majority of the sales from their work. The standard royalty calculation is a 65%/35% split between the content owner and mycontent.com. This is an industry leading royalty reward level for our artists and individual content providers. mycontent.com does remove some transaction fees to cover the costs of payment and processing.

All revenue is considered identical for this split: Monthly subscriptions, download purchases, or rentals. In the future, mycontent.com plans to offer advertising royalties based off of the same royalty split to support the distribution of free content.

mycontent's 35% portion of the royalty payment covers all the operational costs that mycontent provides, including storage, streaming, processing, marketing and any other cost related to the business.

Assume in one month, Artist A sells 1,000 song downloads at $2 per download, or $2,000 total. A transaction fee of 5 cents per item plus 5% of the item cost applies to each sale. So, total Transaction fees for the month are (1000 * $0.05) + ($2000 * .05%), which equals $150 of the total sales revenue. In addition, we charge a small monthly processing fee, which covers the costs of distributing royalty monies into your account, which is a maximum of $1 for a total fee subtraction of $151.

The 65/35 revenue split is then calculated out of the remaining $1849 in sales, which equals:
Royalty to you = 65%*(Revenue-Fees) = $1,201.85
Share to mycontent.com = 35%*(Revenue-Fees) = $647.15

While there are costs to running the web service at mycontent.com, such as servers, storage, content management and delivery, ecommerce fees, support and maintenance, a significant portion of the royalty fees that mycontent.com receives will be used to further market and promote the site, and in turn increase exposure to your content.

Each month you will receive the month's closing royalty statement at the email you provided with your Verified Paypal account. This statement will include a summary of activity for the month, any balance from previous statements and a record of any royalty payments. Following the statement, within 30 days you will receive an email with a link and instructions to easily transfer the money from mycontent.com to your PayPal account. Note that to minimize transaction costs, we will not distribute payment until $25 has been accrued in your account.

You must be 18 years old to have a “Verified” PayPal account and we will not be able to send any payments until you have been Verified by PayPal.

To keep transaction costs low, we've determined that $25 maximizes the take-home royalties for artists. If your balance is less than $25, it will continue to roll over into the next month's statement until your balance reaches $25, after which, it will be paid in full.

If you wish to cancel your account prior to accruing $25 worth of royalties, please contact support.

Here's the tough part where we have to act like "The Man".  Since mycontent.com is an outlet for professional and legal distribution of media, we must report royalty income to the IRS for any artists receiving more than $10 in any year.

At the end of the year, we will deliver a 1099/1042 form to you and the US Internal Revenue Service as required by law. To enable us to report this income, we must collect information such as address and tax id, which you have already provided if you signed up as a "seller" when you registered for mycontent.com.

If the Non US User or Content Provider is a foreign resident then they need to provide an ITIN (Individual Taxpayer Identification Number). To apply for an ITIN foreign residents must complete form W-7 with the IRS as located here:
http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/fw7.pdf

If the Content Provider is a US citizen, is not an individual, and would like a Employer Identification Number they need to complete form SS-4 before filling in the EIN box as found in Line 6 of the W-8BEN. The SS-4 form can be found at:
http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/fss4.pdf

A number of states require taxes to be levied on internet transactions and sales. If you reside in such a state, and if the product you are purchasing is taxable, sales tax on your purchase will be automatically added at checkout.

Seller Questions

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Yes. Here's a link to the Quick Start Guide for content owners and the Detailed User Guide

You can sell and distribute your content in multiple ways at any price point you want. If you want to sell your content, please set a minimum price of $0.69 to cover credit card charges. There is a pre-set maximum of $299.00, which can be removed by request.

For distribution, there are several choices to choose from:

• Single: you can sell each piece of content individually
• Package: you create a bundle of content, such as: two songs, one video
• Subscription: users can subscribe monthly to content on your page
• Rental: you can choose to rent your content for 24 hours or up to 30 days

You are in control of the model and the price for your media at any time. mycontent.com handles the complexities of processing and collects the money on your behalf. Prices can be set anywhere between $0.69 and $299. The lower limit is based upon the fees for credit card transactions and general operating costs. The upper limit is set to avoid issues with over-pricing abuses that have occurred on other digital media sites.

Your total storage is based off of the combined size of the media you upload for share and sale at mycontent.com. The limit of 2.5 GB would cover a 90 minute HQ movie or approximately, 3,000 mp3 files. While we do not anticipate that many users will surpass this storage limit, we will offer options for adding storage. Email support if you would like to increase your storage.

When you publish content (a subscription, package, or single product), you have the option to select: "consider this content for a feature." When you select this option, your content is automatically flagged for review by our team and could end up on the front page! You may also send an inquiry to content@mycontent.com.

Simply put, a package is any combination of music, video or other media that is offered at a single download or rental price. A subscription is essentially a channel of content from a single artist, which is made available at a renewing monthly price. Artists can add or subtract content from a subscription channel at any time.

To protect purchasers of your content, once a package has been made available for sale, we do not allow any changes. This prevents confusion in case an older package was purchased and an updated version added new media for the same price. This also adds consumer protection in the case that purchased content is removed from an updated package. If you anticipate needing to add or remove content frequently, offering your content through a subscription channel may be a better decision.

Today content owners can view and sort their content by most viewed, best selling, top-rated, most commented on and other methods that users of the site will use to discover new content. As the site progresses, we plan to wrap further analytics packages into the site so that content owners can glean further information on how traffic arrives to and departs from their storefront. Stay tuned!

If you are seeking expertise on producing a live or pay-per-view event, contact our live events team at Live_Events . Our team has produced concerts, CD release parties, award-winning documentaries, and even Wrestling pay-per-view events, so we can likely match your event’s needs.

mycontent.com has several safeguards built in to make sure visitors to the site do not upload and sell content they do not own, including:

• Verification that content owners have a valid bank account and federal tax id which can be used to identify individuals should issues occur;
• Ability to easily report copyright violations and disputes via the media player;
• Holding payments for 30 days in case mycontent.com discovers that a user has sold content they do not own or have rights to publish;
• The ability for artists to post and monetize “fan media” to their storefront; and
• A commitment to full compliance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). For more information, please see our DMCA policy page.

Recently, labels and digital download stores such as iTunes and Amazon.com have started to offer purchased downloads without DRM protection. We believe this is the appropriate method to distribute paid downloads and ultimately adds more exposure for the artist while offering more flexible "fair use" for the consumer. We will continue to evaluate this policy over the coming months.

mycontent.com combines authentication and encryption to ensure that your media is only accessible by those that have purchased a license. In addition, unique URLs for purchased media make it impossible for someone to share the url to a purchased file. In addition, free and rental content is only available via streaming, which makes it more difficult to capture media in its entirety. It is important to note that for purchased downloads,mycontent.com will not be encrypting media as the consumer market is trending toward DRM-free downloads.

Site Questions

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Pro accounts are intended for mycontent.com users that wish to publish media and sell it in some way. Standard accounts retain all purchase and viewing functionality, but do not include the additional controls needed to sell and distribute content. These controls become available once a user upgrades from standard to pro, which can be done here: Upgrade to a Pro Account Now!

Profile pages for "Professional" accounts include text fields for news, events, influences and links to other sites, such as your band's MySpace page. This information can be edited at any time in account settings and displays on your storefront. Standard accounts allow users to specify bio, favorite links and news. Include any information allowed by our terms of use.

The quality of the media is largely dependent on the quality of video that is uploaded to our systems in the first place. If a version is uploaded at a very high-resolution, both a standard definition file and a high definition file will be created, along with a preview of the content. If a low resolution video is provided it cannot be improved by our processing.

In most cases, downloads will be available for more than 30 days. In the rare case that an artist chooses to no longer sell a piece of content and removes it from the system, we guarantee that it will remain downloadable for 30 days from that point in case of recent purchases.

Yes, you can, and we certainly encourage it as a way to expand your fan base via blogs and other sites. For content available for free, the full media will play on the third party site. For media with a set price, a preview will be available on third party sites, and the full 'for sale' version will be available at mycontent.com from that player.

Remove all of your products and media files and send an email to support@mycontent.com

mycontent.com takes security of your personal information very seriously. All information related to customers is transferred leveraging Extended Validation VeriSign SSL security certificates that require a number of levels of business verification to obtain. In addition, the servers where your information is hosted are limited to only necessary operations staff. Personal information is stored in a database secured behind a firewall in a different network and security segment than our web servers that are also behind a firewall at our premier Tier 1 hosting company.

Today we don’t have the digital rights management in place to offer subscription content for temporary download to iPods and other media players. As the site continues to grow, we will investigate adding a feature of this sort.

No, mycontent.com does not offer refunds on purchased content, intended or otherwise.

Indeed! We’ve compiled a series of “how-to” videos to guide both content owners and fans through navigating and utilizing the site, including how to upload media and create your Storefront. For additional questions, please see the rest of this FAQ or Contact Support.

Technical Questions

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mycontent.com will ingest a wide variety of media formats. Four options for video and one for audio are recommended for best results. The recommended source media formats to use depend on whether the source video is in 16x9 or 4x3 format and whether the source video is high quality or just typical quality. These recommendations will result in the best output formats for preview, streaming and download.

If the source media is in other supported formats or sizes we will be able to ingest and transcode it, but if sized differently or at lower quality, it may be letter-boxed and may have degraded quality. The other supported formats may result in similar high quality media if standard settings have been used when creating and editing the media.

mycontent.com supports a wide variety of video formats, including:

MPEG Audio - .mp1, .mp3, .m4a, .AAC

MPEG Video - .m1v, .mp2v, .mpeg, .mpg, .mpv2, .mp4, .m4v, .3gp, .3g2, .DV

QuickTime - .qt, .mov

Windows Media - .wma, .wmv, .wm, .asf, .avi

For the most professional looking storefront and profile, any uploaded thumbnail or profile images should meet the aspect ratio and size recommendations below. We will not stretch or crop any images so they will be sized to meet the width or height of the page location and will be letter boxed in one dimension if they do not follow the recommended sizes below. Although we will modify as needed, images should be sized for the web at less than 250 KB to increase upload speed and reduce our storage needs.

For most videos, we will automatically create a thumbnail of the appropriate size.  For audio or anytime we cannot automatically create the image, a default placeholder will be used.

The speed of your uploads will depend largely on your network connection and the size of your file. When possible, we recommend a dedicated network connection or Ethernet plug to your PC or Mac to upload files. Some connections are notoriously slow, such as hotel Wi-Fi networks, so we recommend a Broadband connection to upload your media.

After you start an upload you may re-click "Upload New Media" to begin a concurrent file upload. You may minimize these windows while you are waiting for the uploads to complete.