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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.
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.
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
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..
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 $0.99 each, it would only take 111 downloads of your band's songs to break-even. Not bad!!
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
Most record deals with emerging artists ususally take around 70-90% of the profits from album sales (after artificially inflated production costs). TLC, one of the biggest acts of the early 90's sold over 10 million copies of their album 'waterfalls' and walked away with about 170k$ 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!
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!
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.
--
The internet is the greatest source of biased information in the history of mankind.
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..
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
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.
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)...