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.
Great for highschool bands (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Great for highschool bands (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a good point. There would be labour overhead and storage costs for each album. Even if they fully automate the submission process, can Apple swallow the cost of thousands of albums sitting on their hard disks?
What Apple might do is have a sales cut-off for artists, and maybe labels too. Sell a certain amount within a certain time or get kicked.
Re:Great for highschool bands (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Great for highschool bands (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Great for highschool bands (Score:5, Insightful)
Look at Amazon (Score:5, Insightful)
A nice idea, but imagine what it would be like in practice? Britney, Christina, and friends would all have amazing karma and artists like Brian Eno would languish at the bottom of the Hellmouth because mainstream people wouldn't get it.
I think Amazon has been quite successful in avoiding this. You search on specific key words and then look at ratings and reviews. They also have tips such as "people who bought this also liked that". This could work for music also.
Tor
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)...
Re:Great for highschool bands (Score:5, Interesting)
Music would need many axes of moderation. Britney and Christina would certainly get moderated highly, as they are very popular. But only in their respective category.
Different genres should have different moderation "tracks". I should be able to ask something like "What's the most highly moderated Celtic music this week?" or "People who liked Phish's latest album bought a number of other albums. What ones were the most popular?"
If a moderation/rating system had that level of control, we'd have a effective and useful way of separating the wheat from the chaff, at a personal level.
Re:Great for highschool bands (Score:5, Funny)
I can see my tracks getting modded -1, Troll
Re:Great for highschool bands (Score:5, Interesting)
Duhhh... (Score:5, Insightful)
Fuck that. Anyone who doesn't sell will either become discouraged and get a real job, or will persevere until they become great.
There are how many bloggers out there?
The cream will rise to the top even without the old maids at the churn.
Re:Great for highschool bands (Score:3, Interesting)
Plus it would give Apple a marketing boost to claim several million songs instead of several hundred thousand. Even if a large percentage were not of high enough quality to warrant a record label contract (not necessarily an indictment of their artistry these days) it still adds to the bottom line total. And quantity sells.
I'm with you on separating these unsigned bands. But not so much segrega
Re:Great for highschool bands (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Dude, thats almost flaimebait. (Score:5, Insightful)
I wouldn't expect to use MP3.com or iTunes to find music that is totally new to me. At best, I'd maybe use them to check out other albums by artists I already know of.
It seems to me that streaming services, such as live365, are where one would go to find new music. Listen to streaming stations that play the kind of stuff you like, and then go to MP3.com or iTunes to buy it.
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:Great for highschool bands (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think it's that simple. You need a lot more infrastructure than just enclosures. You need somewhere to store the systems, power, cooling, someone to manage them, redundancy, especially if you're going to use IDE drives. And you've also got to contribute to the head office costs. It all adds up.
Even if you multiply that by 10, which is not unreasonable, it's only about $200K for their current load. But then you've got to consider return on capital. They need to make money on their investment, say at least 10%, probably more like 20%. So they need to make say $30K. With depreciation (33% a year) and gross margins of about 30%, they probably need to sell somewhere around 15% of their catalog each year to make a modest profit. Maybe double that to pay off the R&D on developing the shop in the first place.
The question then is can they sell 15-30% of songs from "all-comers" each year? I doubt it.
Re:Great for highschool bands (Score:5, Interesting)
Rackspace isn't that expensive. Power, granted, is a bit of an issue, but most drives can be spun down (just sort by frequency of file touch; then there can be these drives in a back corner - maybe the armageddon closet, as in nobody's downloading the Bran Van 3000 track until the armageddon.) Cooling, you're right.
Someone to manage them? Pfah. RAID 5 pretty much manages itself. You need a monkey to swap the failed drive. Apple can afford both bananas and a pooper scooper. (Sure, you're right. Still.)
So, okay. Let's assume triple redundant drives; that pushes my bareassed guess up from $9k to $27k. Throw on another 3k/y for electricity and cooling, and that's *way* too high. (At least, in PA. You californians and your power grids.) That's $30k/y.
Where you get depreciation at all is beyond me; I suggest you ratify that. Where you get a depreciation of 1/3/y is so far beyond me that it's gone around the planet twice and is tapping on my back. Gross margins you don't need for a marketing ploy, and hosting music that nobody wants is a marketing ploy.
Also, I notice that you've pulled the number 15% out of the thin air. Adding to my $30k/y figure another $25k/y for some college dropout to live his dream job sitting in apple's music farm watching blinkenlights, you start looking at $55k a year; that's not even a quarter the cost of a single national TV spot, and I'm willing to wager that the bands they'd tack on in the process would do a hell of a lot better job of advertising.
"Thank you, this has been Angry Metal Fishnipple, goodnight! If you like our songs, go to iTunes!"
That's gonna get heard for a quarter the cost of a TV spot in every dingy bar across the nation forever more? And it's all the small music enthusiats which make a vocal point of hating record stores and TV spots that are gonna hear it? I can't imagine a better marketing move. I'd like to pretend that I'm surprised I didn't think of it first, but frankly, anyone that can sell Macs is some kind of marketing ultragenius anyway, so . . .
Re:Great for highschool bands (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, you have to factor the cost of your equipment into your expenses. Computers are considered to have a useful life of 3 years (in general, in Australia for tax purposes, probably in corporate America), so you have to add 33% of the cost of your equipment to the expense of delivering the service each year. It's accounting and it's a mysterious thing, I agree.
Also, I notice that you've pulled the number 15% out of the thin air.
Indeed. But this whole discussion is based on thin air figures if we're talking about how Apple would actually cost it.
The more general point I'm trying to make is that corporate costings are way different to what most people would consider reasonable and it's mostly due to accounting, which is the result of many things that most people don't think of.
A little story: I used to work for an investment bank. They had a tricky database optimisation problem and no time or budget to get a programmer (me) to do it. It was a 12 Gig database, so I said: buy another 12 Gig of memory and plop it in the server, allocate it as cache and your database will rush (reporting database, practically no updates). They told me it was impossible because the memory would cost $AUD30K (about $USD15K) a year! (This was only a couple of years ago) Why? Becuase the IT department factored in the cost of "support" for all hardware they sold. Go figure.
Re:Great for highschool bands (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, you have to factor the cost of your equipment into your expenses. Computers are considered to have a useful life of 3 years (in general, in Australia for tax purposes, probably in corporate America), so you have to add 33% of the cost of your equipment to the expense of delivering the service each year. It's accounting and it's a mysterious thing, I agree.
Hm. That's an interesting take. For the purposes of finding a way to squeeze money out of taxes, that's probably great. But if they're being sensible and using drives with a high MTBF, then their estimated life span seems less important than their actual life span. Granted, I've never run a service like this, but I'm willing to wager that an average whole-drive turnover of 5.5 years or more isn't unreasonable. Either way, it seems quite likely to compare very favorably to the cost of commercials.
The more general point I'm trying to make is that corporate costings are way different to what most people would consider reasonable and it's mostly due to accounting, which is the result of many things that most people don't think of.
There's certainly something to this. However, the better a job we do of nailing down those actual numbers, the better job we can do of comparing those numbers to numbers we made up about other industries.
because the memory would cost $AUD30K (about $USD15K) a year!
Now that you've presented it that way, that gives me a very different take on costs. That said, I stand by my argument, because I'm comparing it to another cost which has an ongoing nature: advertising.
Remember, if it were a service issue, I'd be with you: too expensive and a bother. But I really think that they'll do it on the advertising basis alone. I mean, think about the discounts that malls give to big "destination" stores, because they drive up the visit rates to the other stores in the mall, allowing those smaller stores to pay the otherwise exorbitant rent.
And besides, I want them to host my friend's band, so maybe a viral meme started here will eventually get back to them.
Re:Great for highschool bands (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah I know, it IS refreshing, but I still would feel better if I saw a 'fucktard' or two.
--Joey
Better deals abroad (Score:5, Interesting)
Not only that, but since 301 is a label with an established global infrastructure, there's a mechanism there [hyperstudy.com] to support an act no matter how popular it becomes. This guy is no small potatos [digitalprosound.com].
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:Great for highschool bands (Score:5, Funny)
If I can, why can't they?
Re:Great for highschool bands (Score:3, Insightful)
Unless you were talking about iTunes, which already has contracts with the RIAA, and consequently cannot be sued by them.
Don't take offense, I don't mean to single you out - but I find comments like this truly depressing. Somehow the RIAA seems to have subliminally brainwashed us - even though of us who are anti-RIAA - into believing that any sor
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.
Methinks... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Methinks... (Score:2)
We'll see (Score:2)
Re:We'll see (Score:3, Funny)
Silly coward - you trust what the editors put in the title???
In other news ... (Score:5, Funny)
$40 an album seems cheap (Score:5, Interesting)
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:$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.
Re:$40 an album seems cheap (Score:3, Interesting)
Right, 65 cents is the figure that I've read in a few articles about the iTunes Music Store. So, going on 59 cents is the artists cut that means that if you can sell about 68 tracks you will break even. At 12 tracks per album that means that if you sell 6 albums then you can make a profit, that's way better than
Re:$40 an album seems cheap (Score:3, Insightful)
>your digital distribution rights and I will guarantee your
>album will do just as well as it would have with CDBaby.
Do you have a contract with Apple?
I strongly suspect that CDBaby does, considering the past announcement wrt independents comming in to the iTMS was from their website.
> Storage and maintenance is not cheap for sites like
> ITune.
They get XServes and XServe RAID arrays at cost. At 1MB/min (approx, a little less actual
Re:$40 an album seems cheap (Score:3)
Please, put your vitriol away before posting next time, geeze, if I didn't know better I would say you are resentful.
> Where on CDBaby site say they have ANY relationship
> with ANYBODY???
<a href="http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03 / 06/06/1548241&mode=thread&tid=141&tid=188">This is the
<a href="http://cdbaby.net/itunes">This is on their website</a>
So either:
1) This business plan is unsub
Re:$40 an album seems cheap (Score:3, Funny)
I don't know why but I'm picturing an enormous 40-foot-high iPod sitting in an aircraft hangar outside Cupertino...
What abount major artists (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What abount major artists (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What abount major artists (Score:3, Insightful)
As for artists that have already signed, well, they're screwed.
Re:What abount major artists (Score:3, Insightful)
However, they will miss out on the promotion that the dollars of a big label can provide--and, like it or not, that's how music gets heard. You'll still have the indies with their websites and live venues; presumably both will direct you to their stuff on the iTunes Music Store, cool. But you're not likely to hear them on the radio, nor are you going to see any print ads. Probably not interviews, either.
So you'll still have to know where to look on the iTMS, or you'll have to browse really deeply.
I th
Looks like a good deal (Score:4, Insightful)
Also, this could bring a fair amount of indie music to the iTMS. Personally, I'm all for it. Hopefully, CD Baby can get the word out effectively.
Great idea! (Score:3, Insightful)
Regardless, the RIAA have done themselves no favours with their continued insanity, and this iTunes venture comes on the heels of Michael Jackson (he may be a nutter, but he's one of the top grossing artists of all time) saying that going to jail for downloading MP3's is nuts and that the RIAA needs to find a new solution rather than making criminals out of people.
So, anyone care to start an "RIAA Dead Pool". I reckon they'll be dead and gone by 2007.
Re:Great idea! (Score:5, Insightful)
$40 helps cut the crap (Score:3, Insightful)
HP had to lose the 1-800 number because so many people were calling about inane things and preventing the techs from helping people with actual problems.
By charging a relativly small fee they cut off the bottom of the bucket (like people who sing songs about Laci Peterson) and encourage better bands not
Re:Great idea! (Score:5, Funny)
That's what their girlfriends are for. If they're not mercinary enough to be nailing a girl with some cashflow they should have their "rock star" badge confiscated.
Re:Great idea! (Score:4, Interesting)
I love the idea of indie bands telling their audience We have CD's for sale here tonight or you can just go to CDBaby and buy them there". It's an easy to remember web site that the customers can still remember after a few beers.
Great idea. I hope CDBaby makes millions (which means the bands they represent will make tens of millions. That's kind of a nice change isn't it?)
Go forth, but cautiously... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Go forth, but cautiously... (Score:5, Interesting)
* Our servers are running 100% OpenBSD - the world's most secure operating system. Powered by Apache, PHP, and MySQL.
* No Microsoft products were used in the creation of this website.
* We try to stay HTML 4.0 compliant. No special web browser needed. (I recommend the Opera and Mozilla web browsers for their speed and standards.)
* CD Baby website (front end and back end) made by me - Derek Sivers. It's my favorite hobby.
http://www.cdbaby.com/about
Re:Go forth, but cautiously... (Score:5, Funny)
A friend of mine who got something from them a while ago also thought their e-mail confirmation was absolutely hilarious:
"Your CDs have been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.
A team of 50 employees inspected your CDs and polished them to make sure they were in the best possible condition before mailing.
Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CDs into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy.
We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved 'Bon Voyage!' to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day, Thursday, April 17th.
I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did. Your picture is on our wall as "Customer of the Year". We're all exhausted but can't wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM"
Re:Go forth, but cautiously... (Score:3, Interesting)
I also very much like lawyer-free way the deal is explained. Even *I* understood it and I'm dumb at that sort of thing.
Also their terribly good taste in OS's didn't hurt either.....
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.
A
Re:Go forth, but cautiously... (Score:3, Funny)
Screw that! (Score:4, Funny)
Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. (Score:5, Interesting)
Now you can sell your own electronically encoded tunes on a gigantic global network that has a massive ad campaign behind it, for $40.
Good for CD Baby. They negotiated the deal with Apple and seem to be happy to provide the connection. The terms are more than reasonable. Hell, for $40, I'd make an album just to *see* if I had any musical talent that anyone else appreciated. (er, I don't.)
Now, what we need is some sort of powerful mechanism for allowing people to be introduced to music they'd like, but don't know the name of. I've often thought a moderation-style system similar to what Slashdot has would be useful. Of course, its ony a tiny hop from there to find all those wonderful demographics marketers crave.. you know.. the Volkswagen-Coke-Nintendo-Apple-Sony style connections...
Re:Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd love to mod this up, but I'll reply instead.
CD Baby has that sort of mechanism, or at least something like it. Searching around the iTunes store didn't really help me much, because a lot of the music I listen to (Delerium, Balligomingo, Ceredwen, and assorted video game music) either isn't available, or really doesn't fall into any particular category. I went to read the article, then went to CD Baby and started browsing CDs. Their searching feature for something that "sounds like" a different artist caught my eye, and now I'm happily looking at different trance/tribal artists that, though certainly not mimicking Delerium, have a similar feel. I can't get that by going to a store, and this is the first time I've ever seen anyone give that sort of feature prominence.
Anyone know of other online stores that feature this? CD Baby's got a good start, but I'm really not keen on the million albums that require RealPlayer for me to listen to them.
Good Start (Score:2)
The big plus side about this though is that it really starts to bring Darwin to the music scene. If a song sucks, less people will buy it if there's better stuff out there. Obviously there are still kinks in this system, but its a HELLUVA lot better than before where if you weren't with a label, NOBODY would hear/b
CD Baby Cares (Score:5, Funny)
Your CD has been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.
A team of 50 employees inspected your CD and polished it to make sure it was in the best possible condition before mailing.
Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CD into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy.
We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved 'Bon Voyage!' to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day, Tuesday, July 15th. I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did. Your picture is on our wall as 'Customer of the Year'. We're all exhausted but can't wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!
All that, and shipping was only $2.25!
Wait! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:CD Baby Cares (Score:5, Funny)
All the companies know this, and revere this sacred time and let all of us get off work for it. Don't worry, it's all paid time off. Sometimes they even will allow us to use the company limo to travel down there, complete with caviar.
Re:CD Baby Cares (Score:3, Funny)
1999, Is that you?
In your dreams... (Score:5, Funny)
Imagine being a touring indie band and telling 95% of your audience that your music is on the iTunes store but they cannot listen to it because they don't have a Mac! That will really show the RIAA!
Yes: By December (Score:3, Informative)
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
Read their stuff first (Score:3, Interesting)
They say you just lend us the right to be your digital distributor: to get your music to legitimate music services like Apple iTunes, Listen.com, and more
So...does anyone have any idea how many CDs CD Baby has actually put up on iTunes? They say they will be your digital distributor...but just how successful are they in that role?
This is a good start : Choices (Score:2)
Proper Job... Finally... (Score:5, Interesting)
Nice to see someone doing this. Too bad for those involved with the RIAA that it's not one of them. I give iTunes a year in which it will grow and prosper. Then, the recording industry will finally give up and begin their own knockoffs (which will be nowhere near as good). One year...
Troy
Re:Proper Job... Finally... (Score:3, Insightful)
Industry Response (Score:5, Funny)
(1) Typical profit per sale will range between -5% and 3% depending on marketing terms and market conditions
(2) Setup costs of $30 available to Ultra Platinum Plus artists only. Typical setup costs between $80-200 per song.
(3) Payment processing is facilitated by a third party contractor; allow 5-8 months lead time for most transactions.
(4) Expedited 20-day cancellation requires rapid cancellation charge of $10,000. Expedited cancellation not available for top-selling titles. Standard requests for contract cancellation will be considered on a per-request basis.
Looks like these guys want to be the cafepress (Score:2)
Let's hope they do a better job of artistic managment then CP did.....
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..
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Fantastic! (Score:5, Interesting)
The music industry is one area where the big corporation have been allowed to force people into contract that would violate labour laws if they were proposed in other sectors. We have been waiting with baited breath for technology to break down the barriers that have stopped artists from being freed, yet the technology companies themselves hove mostly worked with the RIAA to perpetuate this arrangement.
Bravo, Apple. I do understand that you are only interested in dollars like every other corporation, but you have shown that you do value creativeity and freedom as well, just like you keep telling us!
Re:Fantastic! (Score:3, Funny)
What? You work for free?
What I want to see... (Score:3, Insightful)
IF they get someone on there, then I can jump for joy; until then, it could very well be bogus. Only time will tell...
Not too shabby (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Not too shabby (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not sure about that, by my calculations it works out to 68 songs.
99 cents per track
Apple gets 34 and label gets 65 according to several articles I've read.
65 cents * 91% = 59.15 cents per track to the artist
$40 / $0.5915 per track = 67.6 tracks
Round off to 68
So it's even more amazing than you thought. As I pointed out earlier, if you have 12 tracks per album then after 6 albums you would see a profit. That's pretty damn good.
Re:Not too shabby (Score:4, Interesting)
But anyway, yes, the whole idea is awesome. I might break out Fast Tracker II from years past and crank out some music again, mainly to have it available on the iTMS.
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!
CD Albums... (Score:4, Interesting)
Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music DwnLoads (Score:5, Interesting)
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-
Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads [goingware.com]
If you're a musician who offers free music downloads, I will link to your website if you give my article a reciprocal link. Please read the instructions here [goingware.com].Send your comments to crawford@goingware.com [mailto]
Thanks for your help.
Oh no, Elliot Smith becomes huge after all... (Score:3, Funny)
This is the worst thing imaginable..!!!
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..
I was partially wrong (Score:3, Interesting)
The synopsis does say it's limited to just those services. I'm looking at the actual agreement [cdbaby.net] you have to click through, which *seems* to conflict with the synopsisy thing. I may or may not be misinterpreting what this means. In fact, i'm really not s
Don't get your hopes up. (Score:3, Insightful)
If you're a touring indie band, you probably already have a record label. Indie means not on a major label. It doesn't mean unsigned. This service is to get unsigned artists a representative to push your music in the digtal world.
"it seems this could be a huge boon to musicians wanting to circumvent/boycott/avoid/destroy the RIAA."
If you don't have a record label, you won't get any radio airplay. For your $40, CDBaby will listen to your music, take the best of what they get, and hope someone like Apple is willing to sell it online. Whether or not anyone previews it and buys it is anyone's guess.
Wait a second... (Score:4, Insightful)
These aren't physical CDs, they're just music files, so why is CD Baby taking a continual 9% cut of your music?
Anyway, for most bands it's tough enough getting people to listen to your songs even if you put them online for free. So, this is probably just another way to coax money out of indie hopefuls.
whoopty-doo, digital distribution! (Score:5, Insightful)
Just ask an indie artist when the last time someone downloaded their free MP3s off of Kazzaa... even providing the content for free will not guarantee anyone will ever download it.
What the labels get the big $$$ for is promotion, at least that is what they tell the artists. The labels have the connections... they can get you on the radio, opening for a popular band or a guest spot on Letterman etc. This is what makes the difference between selling 10,000 albums and 500,000 albums.
There are a ton of companies that distribute indie artists' albums, but these companies do little or no promotions beyond a "featured artist" list on their website or a sampler CD with new music.
The company that can find a way to connect with listeners and invade existing promotion channels while creating a new model that provides the artists with the bulk of the $$$ and provide direct digital distribution will change the industry... believe me, I have been cooking ideas related to this for years. I would love to see the industry turned on its ear.
If you have an existing fan base, this might be a great way to get your music out there without the expense of pressing CDs... but it will be catch-as-catch-can unless you have some kind of promotion tied to it.
But as far as I am concerned, much of what I hear is idle words... if you want to support indie artist, hit one of your local music venues and pay the $10 cover and you will discover that there are a ton of fantastic artists out there... nearly all of which will never make big $$$ playing music. The catch is that by going to a show, you may create a greater demand for physical or digital distribution of indie music. And if you are the type that doesn't actually have social interaction with others, spend some time on MP3.com listening to indie artists and buying their music.
Apple: Read This (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, you could allow people who purchased an iPod to download one song for free off of each album on indie.iTunes.com. As it stands now, if you were going to fill a 30GB iPod the legit way, it would cost you about $7,500 (assuming that you only store music on your iPod). IPods would fly off of the shelves, as would some great music that needs a chance!
Re:Just Checking (Score:4, Insightful)
We like the iTunes Music Store because it uses reasonable DRM and a good format.
See the difference?
Re:Just Checking (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Just Checking (Score:2)
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.
Re:Just Checking (Score:5, Interesting)
And, by the way, you can "hate DRM" all you want, but someone had to toss a bone to the RIAA for some music to get sold, man. If the Apple iTMS is innovative at all (and it is) then it is innovative solely because of the fairly decent customer rights that accompany the downloads. If you're holding out for the totally unrestricted, uncompressed downloads for $0.04 per song, like some folks here seem to be doing, I think you'll be hearing a lot of silence. Or using illegal services. The copyright holders for popular music (the big 5 labels, the RIAA, etc.) will never, never, go with a service who's restrictions on illegal redistribution amount to nothing more than "the honor system."
Finally, I'm getting tired of the very vocal minority here at slashdot who insist, thread after thread, that Apple gets some sort of special privelaged treatment in these forums. Thier reputation here has risen above the likes of Microsoft in recent years, it's true, but they still take quite a few lumps around here. Some of them are even deserved! So if you say Apple is the slashdot darling, then I say "bullshit." It's rare enough that they get credited for what they do get right.
Re:Just Checking (Score:3, Insightful)
So do I, but believe it or not, it was an oft-repeated criticism here in these very forums. In many a sub-thread about the merits of Ogg Vorbis, AAC and MP3, there was always one or two yahoos who proudly proclaimed that they wouldn't ever pay for anything but uncompressed audio. I don't share that opinion and neither do most others I'm sure.
We all hate and fear the RIAA and the MPAA...and with good reason. But to sit there and suggest that they should
Re:Just Checking (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not an all-or-nothing deal. They don't have to sell completely unrestricted content in order to woo customers away from illegal services. They just have to sell content with restrictions that people are willing to live with. That approach has the added benefit of actually deterring some folks from turning around and illegally redistributing it. Bonus!
If there were real compet
Re:91% of what? (Score:3, Insightful)
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:Why deal with CDBaby ? (Score:4, Insightful)
Nope. Apple's already said they're going to deal with only distributers. Smart decision if you ask me, you don't want to have to become a record company and deal with all that hassle (A&R, contracts, etc), plus you want to remain "neutral" so as to not piss off the other record companies. Not to mention 2 living Beatles, one tone deaf asian widow and the reincarnated soul of George in the form of a goat would sue you faster than you could say "Apple Records".
Because CdBaby isn't run by greedy fools? (Score:3, Insightful)
Last I looked, CDbaby wasn't trying to co-opt Madonna and Linkin Park. CDBaby stands by its own artists and doesn't try to osmosize the copyrighted works of other studios.
And that's why CDBaby won't become another MP3.com.
Re:diskfaktory seems a much better deal (Score:4, Interesting)