Sell Your Music on iTunes Music Store 432
Photo_Designer writes "CD Baby is now accepting music to be sold via digital distibution through iTunes Music Store, Listen.com and others. Their cut is 9 percent. The artists get 91 percent of the sale and retain all the rights to their music. There is a $40 fee for each album submitted. It will be interesting to see how much indie music gets on and how it does. Imagine being a touring indie band and be able to tell people to go to iTunes and buy your songs; it seems this could be a huge boon to musicians wanting to circumvent/boycott/avoid/destroy the RIAA." Note that this is not an agreement to get on iTMS or any other service, only for CD Baby to be your distributor. iTMS can still reject your sorry attempt at fame.
Re:Just Checking (Score:4, Informative)
That being said, there are fundamental differences between the apple and buymusic.com approaches to treating their customers. Apple has uniform licensing which guarantees unlimited burns, simultaneous access to the music on 3 computers (with the option to change the computers as often as you wish), and unlimited transfers to an iPod. (apple needs to add support for more players)
BuyMusic.com offers none of these things. Songs are tied to ONE computer, without the ability to change that. Depending upon the particular song, burns and transfers to a (select) number of mp3 players is limited to a discrete number.
cdbaby is good for the artist (Score:5, Informative)
I've ordered a number of CDs from CDbaby recently in all cases after being in touch with the artist themselves - to find out where I could get their music from.
These guys are good, they have a range of shipping options that make it possible to order internationally with no hassle - they'll ship cds with no cases so that it can go via post as opposed to package.
The artists seem reasonably happy with their cut, in fact one told me that it was the first time he was able to pay his rent with CD sales.
This may sound like an advert, but they really were a pleasant suprise. As i like music, that's mainly non-stream especially with the slashdot crowd (modern jazz & real fusion), it was great to find an outlet which stocked these.
-- ac
Not what it seems?... (Score:5, Informative)
I'm still waiting for a totally digital distributor, since I think that will be the next big thing..
Not too shabby (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Let me be the first to say (Score:1, Informative)
If you're looking for REALLY indie music, check out Section Z [sectionz.com] ("bedroom musicians", mixed bag - some are VERY good) or SpinWarp [spinwarp.com] (D&B music and production techniques)...
Artists: did you catch that: 9%? (Score:4, Informative)
Basically, artists could sell about 1/10th (or less) of the records online as they normally would through normal channels and make more money!
Re:Go forth, but cautiously... (Score:3, Informative)
Heh, they'll send you cutsey email telling you you're their number on customer though. Well, they do take your money fast. I would prefer getting customer support myself.
And the music industry wonders why they're in trouble...
Yes: By December (Score:3, Informative)
Re:$40 an album seems cheap (Score:3, Informative)
If it's only costing you 44 dollars to make a record, I don't want to hear it.
Re:Why deal with CDBaby ? (Score:5, Informative)
For one, Apple *will not* deal with the band themselves. Read anything put out by them and they make that explicitly clear.
What CD Baby is doing is acting like a record label on behalf of the 38,000+ indie artists who sell their music through CD Baby, even though CD Baby has no exclusive right to the CDs sold on that site.
Instead of going through a point-by-point refutation of your garbage, why not actually read a little [cdbaby.net] to see what's happening.
Cheers!
Re:$40 an album seems cheap (Score:5, Informative)
IIRC, Apple gives the record label (or CDBaby, in this case) 65 cents per 99 cent track. CDBaby will then take a 9% cut of that 65 cents, leaving the artist with about 59 cents from each track sold. NOT BAD!
So if you managed to sell a little over a million tracks, you'd pocket a cool $600,000 dollars or so.
diskfaktory seems a much better deal (Score:1, Informative)
diskfaktory [diskfaktory.com] will print up as little as 50 cds with text printing for $50... A $1 per cd that a band can sell for $5 and make $4 a cd. Or for 100 cd's or something like that with FULL COLOR ARTWORK on the cd and I believe a four page booklet for $3 a cd. Seem's like a really fair deal to me. I'm working on doing local compilation albums with a few other bands, as well as a cd for my band, and we're not gonna need huge runs of 1000s of cds so this is perfect for us. The only downside is they're on CD-R's but even so, they still sound exactly the same.
Re:novellty press (Score:2, Informative)
I have five books currently available from xlibris. For this I didn't pay xlibris a penny, and the books generate a modest but steady steam of income, including money flowing from orders through online bookstores (including amazon.com). Online bookstores typically don't care where they get the books from, they just want to take their cut when they sell a book. Which is as it should be, it seems to me.
I do have gripes about xlibris, but your statements/implications about them are simply wrong.
The midlist authors I know (which is not an insubstantial number) would almost all agree with me that companies like xlibris (and, hence, cdbaby) perform a valuable service in that they allow fans easy access to an artist's output without forcing the artist to deal with megacorporations.
It's actually $75 (Score:5, Informative)
My only worry with this is that as far as I can tell, CDBABY isn't *required* to do anything.. they have to attempt to get you on these services but if the services all reject you, you still have spent $40.
Moreover, it *appears* from the contract [cdbaby.net] that if you want out-- like, in the unlikely event if iTunes Music Store doesn't accept you through cdbaby, but you later find a way you can get on iTMS not through CDBaby, but you are bound by CDBaby to go through them-- you can do so without penalty, but not until either three and a half years from the start of the agreement or until CDBaby wants to change the terms of your contract, whichever comes first.. that's much better than it could be, of course, the contract isn't limitless and you can get out freely after that block of time, but it decreases the ability to do this kind of thing just as a what-the-heck kind of thing.
Here's the thing I can't figure out from the contract. If you sign up with them, do they have exclusive rights to ALL online distribution, or only online distribution through the services that CDBaby works with such as iTMS? In essence, if I signed up with them, would I still be able to distribute mp3s on my own website of the material signed over to them? The little slide-show seems to imply this would be allowed, but 8ai and 8aiii in the contract seem to say that CDBaby has been given an exclusive right to this as well.
Anyway, definitely interesting. I'd like to see if there's any other way to get onto iTMS or other services first as a complete independent, but I will definitely keep these CDBaby people in mind..
Re:Great for highschool bands (Score:4, Informative)
Most of the semi-serious musicians I know have well over ten thousands dollars of equipement and software, many of the more dedicated ones I know are probably in the hundred-thousand dollar neighborhood.
Starving musicians are starving for a reason... because every single dime they earn goes towards doing something that might move their musical career forward.
Re:Dude, Where's my car? (Score:4, Informative)
Roughly, a CD was 'scanned' (checksummed) to determine what CD it was, and if it was a copy. If it was determined to be correct, you listened to MP3.com's ripped MP3s of the CD. Various attempts were used to make sure you weren't sharing your username and password.
The trouble came because MP3.com was still letting you listen to _their_ CD, not yours.
Re:Not what it seems?... (Score:2, Informative)
In addition to the $40 iTunes setup fee (per album), you have to pay them a $35 setup fee (I forget whether that is per album or not).
So if you didn't "really" have a CD but you want to sell the contents on iTunes and CD Baby, you can burn a few copies yourself and slap a label on it.
Re:Better deals abroad (Score:3, Informative)
Who, Apple? Plus, if you'd actually read CDBaby's terms, you'd realize that their terms are actually quite reasonable. You're not signing with a label, nor is CDBaby your exclusive distributor - they're only your exclusive distributor for on-line distribution, which you can terminate at 30 days notice. Seems pretty flexible to me...
Re:Look at Amazon (Score:2, Informative)
Yeah. In fact Apple's already doing that.
Re:Not what it seems?... (Score:2, Informative)
Anyway, I don't think we have any fundamental disagreements, just more about our definitions. Yeah, you can record some individual things cheaply, but not when you branch out to a full band -- you start to add too many layers of complexity. You said you're really into digital music, what I don't know, and maybe you can clear up, is whether you have experience going into a real studio with an entire band. It's a completely different thing than individually recording music for a game, or doing digital work. I mean, you need a room with decent acoustics (that's somewhere you can play *loud*), good mics, a decent mixer, and then you should probably have a decent recording device (ADAT, 1/2 inch tape, whatever). You can combine any number of these devices when recording solo, or eliminate them if you're purely digital.
Also, recording isn't necessarily par for the course when writing songs, and shouldn't be considered part of writing a song in the first place. I mean, some bands are about different things. My band is all about the live show, someone like, um, Nine Inch Nails, is all about recording, which is not to say they don't tour, but you get the point. For those that love playing live, having a recording is simply a way to get more people to come to your show via airplay or reviews. Now, someone who's more interested in the recording aspect of music, as you seem to be, might not care about the whole performance aspect (though it may be part of the equation), and so recording, reproduction, and related costs may then be much more a part of the whole than a band that's primarily interested in playing live. Of course, neither am I trying to suggest that going into the studio is a burden ;)
I've gone through this process of recording, mixing, mastering, and duplicating a few times now with various bands. I'm not exaggerating the costs. In 1995, the band I was in put out an EP, and we recording five songs in four hours in an adequate studio with a crappy engineer. That cost us $700, the fact that the songs sounded decent is a testament to the amount of practice time we put in, although there are still some glaring mistakes that should've been fixed with overdubs, but we didn't have enought time to listen critically enough to catch them. The duplication costs were around $1200 to $1500 (I don't remember exactly). That was as low budget as I've seen, and the total cost still came to somewhere around $2000. As the recording quality goes up, so do the costs of recording. Professional duplication costs are a very annoying reality. I don't know how to stress enough that you can't get by selling a CD-R at a rock show. Yeah, maybe as a demo that you sell for $5 a pop, but you often can't get them into stores (especially without a UPC code, although some smaller places are better about this than others), and it doesn't help your image as a professional band. Neither does it help you if you only rely on digital downloads, as a lot of people in the indie rock world buy CDs at shows, and will probably forget the URL by the time they get home. If they really like you, maybe they'll sign your mailing list (not a sure thing), and you can market to them there. I think digital downloads are a decent adjunct to the physical thing, and an indie band (not necessarily someone like you) that's only putting out their stuff on CD-R's probably hasn't spent the time and money to record a high quality album either. I'd like to see that change.
Re:Look at Amazon (Score:5, Informative)
Method and system for conducting a discussion relating to an item [uspto.gov]
In the future you will not be allowed to discuss items (read stuff) on the internet. All your discussions must be limited to non stuff (read old woman gossip).
Infact most of the ideas in this thread are patented or pending a patent (which, we all know, will be granted)...