Sell Your Music on iTunes Music Store

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.

Comments

Re:Just Checking

[jeeves99]

True, anything with the MS name on it will get ridiculed severely on slashdot. Thats just the culture here. Also true, slashdot harbors a lot of goodwill towards apple.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

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?...

[treegnome]

I'm a musician, and I've been waiting for something like this to come out. I just called CD Baby and they said that I couldn't JUST spend the $40 and sell digitally, I still had to have a CD printed up and ready to sell physically on their website... which I don't have $3,000 for...

I'm still waiting for a totally digital distributor, since I think that will be the next big thing..

Re:Not what it seems?...

[GrapesForBuddha]

You start off by shipping them 5 CDs. They keep one for their library (and to rip and encode tracks and scan the artwork for their web store).

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:Not what it seems?...

[frightenedmonkey]

Eh, mastering gear costs a lot of money, and you're much better off paying a few hundred bucks a pop to get someone good to do it. Seriously. Not only does it reduce interpersonal band squabbles, but, as the musicians, you lose objectivity in regards to how the record should sound. Mastering is (or should be) a final polish by a skilled technician with damn good ears. I'm getting the feeling that despite your interest in music that you haven't spent a whole lot of time in the studio. I'm not trying to be an ass, but there's a reason most bands work with producers (yes, even indie bands) and engineers (I'll include the mastering techs in with this) that are separate from themselves: you get too close to your own music, you need outside input to make something good. It's the same reason writers have editors, or actors have directors.

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.

Not too shabby

[Jon Abbott]

Given the $40 entry fee, the 91:9 profit ratio with CDBaby, the 40:60 profit ratio with Apple, and assuming that people only download singles for $0.99 each, it would only take 111 downloads of your band's songs to break-even. Not bad!!

Re:Let me be the first to say

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck you RIAA. Put that in your pipe and smoke it!

If you're looking for REALLY indie music, check out Section Z ("bedroom musicians", mixed bag - some are VERY good) or SpinWarp (D&B music and production techniques)...

Artists: did you catch that: 9%?

[MagicMerlin]

Most record deals with emerging artists ususally take around 70-90% of the profits from album sales (after artificially inflated production costs). TLC, one of the biggest acts of the early 90's sold over 10 million copies of their album 'waterfalls' and walked away with about 170k$ each (do the math).

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...

[ambisinistral]

I just had a vey bad experience with CD Baby. I had bought a CD from them that was backordered. About nine months later it dawned on me I never got it. I contacted them via email about it and they did not respond. I had to contact the Artist (Paula Battaglia -- good CD when I got it) who contacted them before to get the issue resolved.

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

[KFury]

Apple has announced that iTunes and the iTMS will be available for Windows before the end of the year.

Re:$40 an album seems cheap

[cabra771]

I take it that you've never been in a band and made an album before. Where should I start...there's recording time and production costs along with other various rental and studio costs, graphic design, promotion, the physical medium for distribution (although online distribution negates this cost), etc...
If it's only costing you 44 dollars to make a record, I don't want to hear it.

Re:Why deal with CDBaby ?

[anonicon]

Nice troll, and very wrong.

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 to see what's happening.

Cheers!

Re:$40 an album seems cheap

[dhovis]

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

[shrewmy]

this seems like its $40 for online distribution where people have to pay to get the mp3s? Great idea and all but who's gonna do that? I go to a lot of concerts and if an artist tells me to go to www.buymycdsonmp3.com or whatever and pay to download their mp3s I'm gonna forget by the time I get home... Now if they have cd's at their show for $5, well here's my money. And I got a nice shiny disc to do what I please with.
diskfaktory 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

[N7DR]

Reminds me of those novellty (sic) press site like xlibris . For "only" a hundered (sic) dollars they would print your buck (sic) and get an ISBN number for you , of course no one would ever take books from them

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

[mcc]

If you read through their little presentation, it's actually $40 per album plus a one-time fee of $35 to set up a cdbaby account. That's still not horribly bad.

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 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

[mosch]

Forty dollars is a bass drum pedal. It's virtually nothing compared to the expenses involved with making and recording music, even at an amateur or semi-professional level.

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?

[tedtimmons]

Wow, that's a pretty bad interpretation of how my.mp3.com worked. No ripping or uploading was involved.

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:Better deals abroad

[Chops-Frozen-Water]

but this really seems more like you're paying them to broker a deal with the people who have, for the most part, completely fucked up the music industry for the last decade

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

[Paradise Pete]

They also have tips such as "people who bought this also liked that". This could work for music also.

Yeah. In fact Apple's already doing that.

Re:Look at Amazon

[RajivSLK]

It's too bad Amazon has already applied for a patent on this... (along with the rest of the internet)

Method and system for conducting a discussion relating to an item

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)...