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Snocap had everything going for them, and could have probably succeeded, but their execution was so bad that it was unbearable.

Check out my What happened with CD Baby and Snocap article, and especially the comments below it, with all these musicians so frustrated that Snocap won't reply to anybody's emails.

The most brilliant idea, with bad execution, is worth nothing.

SHORT VERSION: My company is one of the back-end providers of music to Apple iTunes, EMusic, Rhapsody, and all the other digital music services. But we sell/distribute ONLY independent music directly from the artists - no record labels.

When our sales reports started coming back from Apple, I was stumped. They were artists I had never heard of. I assumed it would be our top-sellers in the physical-CD world, but instead we had artists who had only sold 2 CDs, ever, selling $5000 in downloads.

It took a lot of research, but I figured it out : all of the top-selling albums in the digital music services were albums with cover songs. Often selling their full-album if they had even one cover song on it, which means that strangers were finding them because of that cover song, then liking their original music so much they bought the whole thing.

I'm advising all musicians I know to include one good creative (not-too-covered, not-too-obscure) cover song on their future albums, to help call attention to it in this song-based search world.

For what it's worth:
See the CD Baby sales chart.

An interesting 2004-to-2005 summary comparison:

2004 CD sales : $7.5M
2005 CD sales: $10.3M

2004 digital sales: $0.76M
2005 digital sales: $3.1M

new CDs added in 2004: 28,285
new CDs added in 2005: 37,798

And you can always see our current numbers halfway down the page at cdbaby.com/about.

:-p

Just to throw in one more voice here:

CDbaby is owned by a fellow named Derek whom I've interviewed with.
He's a frontline geek with very high ideals (read his blog: http://www.cdbaby.org/stories.php?topic=7) who has happened to make a business out of it.

He's also providing an excellent resource for independent musicians, and charging very reasonable rates.

Since he has specific inside information about the industry and obviously is part of the slashdot community, I really can't think of a more appropriate nerd to comment on this article.

I gotta admit that when we started doing digital distribution two years ago, I thought it would be just a small income stream for the musicians - some extra income, maybe $5k/month combined.

But our checks from Apple et al have been over $300,000 a month so far this year! And that's just for our catalog of mostly-unknown all-independent music. (And hey for the record, 91% of all that income goes directly to the musician.)

NOTE: a lot of this discovery of independent music is thanks to cover songs - another twist I never expected.

Yes us alpha-geeks here on Slashdot may get our music from allofmp3.com or SoulSeek or whatever, but there's definitely millions paying that 99-cents-per song, or $20/month subscription out there. I get to see the detailed sales reports every month.

(Personally, I'm so impressed with Yahoo Music Unlimited, that it's making me want to use Windows again!)

Another way to sell your music (in addition to CD Baby) is to work directly with companies like Audio Lunchbox. ALB gives 65% of sales to the artist. They also offer up your music in the non-evil MP3 and Ogg Vorbis (even less evil) formats. You can also plug your band across the internet on various indie and digital music sites. Audio Lunchbox also offers forums for just that purpose as does CD Baby and MP3.com.

If the artist so requests, CDBaby will also shop the CD to download services like Rhapsody, BuyMusic, Emusic, the new Napster, AOL's MusicNet, and MusicMatch (no iTunes yet). The cool part is that CDBaby only takes 5% of what the download services pay them, passing on the rest, which is about 60 cents per track, to the artist, and when they do that they forward the detailed accounting report to the artist.

This is great, CDBaby has an impeccable track record of honesty and fair dealing with the artists, and 60 cents is more per track than what the vast majority of signed artists get per entire CD. But the potential for accounting shenanigans perpetrated by the download services themselves is high. They could simply lie, or fail to correct some error in their accounting software, and the artist would be none the wiser. CDBaby already helps independant artists by harnessing the collective bargaining power of all its members, but the additional pressure and oversight of a union like Mudda could help keep the pressure on.

Lack of success eh?

Looks like mp3.com isn't the only place that does this sort of thing. Maybe you ought to do some research before making blanket accusations

Note the paid to Musicians title

Apple iTunes is paying the label 65 cents per download, (as reported many places). Of that we can pass almost all of it to the artist, since we're not a record label, and have no up-front expenses.

You can see my notes on Apple's meeting with independent record labels here (pt 1) and here (pt 2).

At CD Baby we work directly with 38,000 musicians (NO record labels) that are selling their music direct to the world.

Just like we should all support the independent programming projects when possible, you should support independent music so that these big record labels will have to reinvent themselves or die.

Hurt the record labels, not the musicians themselves. Do a musician a favor. Bypass the labels. Buy direct . (My little store alone has paid over $3 million directly to musicians in the last couple years.)

(See our flavor galleries for some real creative browsing.)

From the article: * Every album needs to have a UPC Barcode!

Buuuuut... CD Baby doesn't require a barcode and doesn't get one for you so I see some problems with CD Baby being able to supply Apple with all the required stuff.

Huh? have you actually looked at their site? CD Baby is authorized to issue barcodes, and will do so. They will give anyone selling a CD on CDBaby a barcode for only $20

There are alternatives

This is not news or even decent editorializing...so what are you going to do about it...Tell them what you think about this piece.

Radio is boring and homogenized, and it is hurting CD sales.

Labels should be more artist friendly

Michael Green's 2002 Grammy speech was annoying and pointless. (Even Janis Ian ripped on it.)

Decent recording can be done with reasonable studio costs (He even mentioned the new White Stripes album only costing $10,000 :-) )

Indie labels treat artists better than majors

Labels are a) greedy and b) want control of listeners

This guy is already halfway in our camp. Don't flame him, just educate him a little. In response to his claim that "sales of CDs are in a freefall", point to the recent Christian Science Monitor article we all read that said many indie labels have profits increasing 50-100% a year. Show him that the CDBaby sales figures keep getting better while the RIAA whiles that sales are disappearing.

He talked about musicians

"Of that lot, however, the musicians are frequently the worst off. They're the ones working two crap jobs, skipping meals to pay for studio time, braving treacherous Canadian highways during the dead of winter, sleeping in vans and in strange cities and generally living at the mercy of the capricious industry constructed around their music. Some of them are lucky enough to make a living at their art."

Yeah CD Baby is blossomming, too. It's really funny when you hear those stories from the major labels saying that the whole music industry is declining (cough cough).

I suspect it's just the majors that are declining because all the independent musicians I know are reaching more people than ever, and are more in control of their own career than ever before!

Look at this most recent sales chart for our one little store.

Slump? What slump?

- Derek