You might have already heard about the Luxembourg based online music store Prefueled and its “entertainment hubs”, which were introduced this year’s February at the MIDEM trade fair in Cannes. The company offers an online social network, online music store, entertainment hubs and they also support unsigned artists. I’ve been following Prefueled’s development with an interest for a while now and I was pleasantly surprised when I had the chance to experiment with their entertainment hub, or Fuel Tank as they call it, in Sweden.

These Fuel Tank entertainment hubs are the thing that sets Prefueled apart from its competitors. Basically they are just computers in a stylized box with a touchscreen display that are connected to Prefueled online music store and allow you to transfer music onto your portable music player using USB, Bluetooth or Wi-Fi connection. The entertainment hubs are placed in key destinations (hotels, airports, music stores etc.) and they offer an innovative way to reach those music consumers, who are not yet familiar with online music stores. Although Internet is a familiar environment for the new generation of music consumers, there are still a lot of elderly people who don’t have a clue about MySpace, Last.fm, iTunes or any other music distribution service.

Even though Prefueled sells content from all four major record labels and thousands of indie labels, the most interesting feature is their community for unsigned artists. You can choose to sell your music through Prefueled’s online music store and entertainment hubs or you can also decide to give your music away for free. If you choose to sell your music, the revenues are split 50/50 after Prefueled has deducted credit card fees and paid royalties to copyright holders and copyright organizations. I read through the terms and conditions for signing up and as far as I understood there weren’t any unfair or tricky terms. Bear in mind though that Prefueled has some audio quality requirements for unsigned artists, so don’t be surprised if your home studio recordings are disapproved.

Prefueled’s online social community (Prefueled People) doesn’t offer any groundbreaking functions and it’s basically just a more polished version of MySpace. On the time I was writing this blog post there were only 900 registered users, so the community has to grow exponentially before it offers any real promotional value for artists. As for the market regions, the company is first targeting only Nordic countries (Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark) so it might take a while before you see the entertainment hubs outside Europe. However, in my humble opinion Prefueled is worth a try since it has a certain amount of hype around it and the entertainment hubs offer an alternative way to distribute your music to the people on the streets.