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

Great for highschool bands

[davisshaver]

This seems like a godsend for many of the bands my friends are in. For 40 dollars they have the chance to be distributed, instead of spending much more on CD's. What are the chances apple will accept them though? It seems like this is what they wanted from that conference they held with the Indie labels.

Re:Great for highschool bands

[MarcQuadra]

Maybe a moderation system is in order?

Re:Great for highschool bands

[Roark Meets Dent]

An easy solution would be to have a separate section for unsigned musicians. This would make it clear to paying customers whether they are shopping "mainstream" music or as-yet-unheard-of bands. I somehow doubt Apple would have any problems storing a few thousand CD's even if they didn't sell too well ... many people I know have that many on their personal hard drives thanks to P2P apps. Remember, Apple isn't selling CD images, they're selling compressed formats.

Re:Great for highschool bands

[SeanAhern]

I would certainly hope that any music moderation system would be more advanced and flexible than slashdot's. Taco would be one of the first to tell you that /.'s moderation system has shortcomings.

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

[stonecypher]

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.

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

[darkov]

Where you get depreciation at all is beyond me

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

[stonecypher]

Oh my god, someone that argues pleasantly and without slander? Am I still on slashdot? :D Mod parent up. He deserves it.

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

[Octagon Most]

"I somehow doubt Apple would have any problems storing a few thousand CD's even if they didn't sell too well"

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 segregating them into a no-label ghetto, but rather highlighting the good stuff as iTunes exclusives.

$40 an album seems cheap

[eoyount]

You'd only need to do $44 in sales to recoup your investment. Of course that assumes that you really get to keep 91% of revenue. What about Apple's cut, if you get on iTunes? Does that come out of their 9%?

Re:$40 an album seems cheap

[Graff]

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.

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 what you'd make selling the physical compact disks!

Re:$40 an album seems cheap

[Aidtopia]

Maybe the music industry is different, but I've taken my shots at traditional fiction and screenwriting. The advice there is always to avoid anybody who charges up front. Legitimate publishers and agents don't charge the author anything. The money is supposed to flow the other way.

Self publishing is becoming more common, but I have yet to meet an author who has even come close to breaking even on one of those.

What abount major artists

[luzrek]

Forget about Joe (or Jill) Artist, what about middle grade artists that have been perpetually screwed by their RIAA contracts.

Why deal with CDBaby ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Surely the band could deal with Apple themselves ?

i thought that was what the internet was about, cutting out the middleman and dealing with the source.

when cdbaby want 9% (which is essentially the price of talking to Apple and a database entry) you can see why the industry is full of no good greedy executives with everyone clammering for a piece of the cash bonanza.

nothing changes egh

Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.

[thatguywhoiam]

This is it. The missing bridge.

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.

[medeii]

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.

Re:Go forth, but cautiously...

[Anonymous Coward]

From the horse's mouth:

* 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

Read their stuff first

[chia_monkey]

At first I was going to scream "holy shitballs! That rocks!" But then I decided to read a bit more on it.

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?

Proper Job... Finally...

[Capt_Troy]

I've been saying for some time that the record industry NEEDS to basically innovate or die. Use technology to boost their sales rather than fighting in a losing battle. They never heeded the words of the great Capt_Troy...

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:Great idea!

[JustAnotherReader]

$40 is Steep? You must be joking. For less than the price of set of guitar strings and a tuner you can distribute your music. That's amazing.

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?)

Fantastic!

[DrWhizBang]

I find it very odd that a computer company (Apple) could be the driver being such a fundamental civil rights change. (aside: If artists can start to be compensated for their work, what's to stop us IT workers and software developers?)

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:Go forth, but cautiously...

[TerryAtWork]

I liked their web site very much. It reminds me of Google.com, another no frills site some people around here may have heard of.

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:Just Checking

[feldsteins]

I think your problem is that you don't understand the difference between "draconian, treat-your-customers-like-criminals" DRM and fairly sensible, "hey-we-gotta-stay-in-business" DRM. Apple uses the latter. Pressplay, the former. From what I've seen of buymusic.com, they fall in the middle. If you don't understand the differences between the services, go read up on them.

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.

CD Albums...

[frission]

I don't know if anyone has posted this...but what i'd like to see is if I choose the option to buy the whole album, I should be able to download a CD image (bin/ccd/nrg/iso/something) of the entire CD (maybe including extras?). It'd be great for songs that seem to merge together (if you burn DAO, disc at once), instead of getting the 2 second gap from TAO (track at once) and messing up the song...of course if you wanted to buy one track at a time, it'd still be mp3/ogg/aac/whatever... :)

Re:Not what it seems?...

[clifyt]

A good friend of mine makes a little change through this company.

He prints the liners with an inkjet printer and buys printable discs (about $0.30 as opposed to $0.10) and has a friend with a CD printer do them up for about $1 each...pretty much the cost of the ink. The cheapest CD Printer on the market is around $350.

Past that, $3000 should get your album mastered and recorded and all that...quite a few popular indy rockers these days doing their entire recording on $5000 or less.

If you can't afford to burn a few CDs and con a friend at a studio to print a few custom discs for you, ya shouldn't be waiting for anything like this because we aren't going to be buying your work anyways.

Better deals abroad

[poptones]

For forty dollars you can join the new label from Tom Misner and have an online distribution chain that carries over into a worldwide CD distribution system. CDBaby is cool, 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.

Not only that, but since 301 is a label with an established global infrastructure, there's a mechanism there to support an act no matter how popular it becomes. This guy is no small potatos.

Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music DwnLoads

[MichaelCrawford]

Many unsigned musicians offer free downloads of their music as a way to attract more fans.

I'm working on an article I hope to publish at Kuro5hin soon. You may find it helpful. In return, I would like your comments on how to improve it. I want to do the very best job I can so that it will be sure to get voted to the front page by the K5 moderators:

• Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads

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.

Send your comments to crawford@goingware.com

Thanks for your help.

Audible.com

[krwren]

I find I like there DRM. Sure they do books not music, but you 3 devices to play the book on, all three can be computers or one computer, two devices or one computer, one device and a CD Burner. But you can only replace one device every six months (Keeps people from taking advantage of the system). However I had a system crash and so all my devices could not be accessed. I gave them a call and within 5 minutes they reset everything (did not even ask why) and I was able to download all my books and get them working again. If someone did the same thing with Music I would be happy.

Re:diskfaktory seems a much better deal

[TheAwfulTruth]

It's ok if you really are printing up more than 100 or so. But it's actually a lot cheaper to do it yourself for smaller runs of 50 at a time... You can do full color for that same $1 if you do it yourself. But... That's just your TIME being used up :) Maybe one person's time is worth more than another's and $3 a disk ends up being worth it...

Re:Not too shabby

[Graff]

it would only take 111 downloads of your band's songs to break-even.

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.

I was partially wrong

[mcc]

You are right, you can in fact terminate the agreement at any time you want. I was confused, i was just looking at the provision defining contract length, i missed the fact that there's a different provision saying either side can cancel with 30 day's notice.

The synopsis does say it's limited to just those services. I'm looking at the actual agreement 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 sure what it means at all. Could this be interpreted as limiting the rights holder from publishing the mp3s on their private website? Of course, it isn't like this matters too much if you can cancel at any time, but...

Authorization.

Subject to the terms of this Agreement, RIGHTS HOLDER hereby appoints CD BABY as RIGHTS HOLDER's exclusive authorized representative for the sale and other distribution of Digital Masters. Accordingly, RIGHTS HOLDER hereby grants an exclusive right to CD BABY, during the Term, to:

reproduce and convert RIGHTS HOLDER Content delivered by RIGHTS HOLDER into Digital Masters;

perform and make thirty (30) second clips of the RIGHTS HOLDER Content available by streaming ("Clips") to promote the sale and distribution of applicable Digital Masters;

promote, sell, distribute, and electronically fulfill and deliver Digital Masters, as individual tracks or entire albums, and associated metadata to purchasers who may use such Digital Masters in accordance with usage rules similar to those set forth in Exhibit A;

(and so on)

Apple: Read This

[The-Perl-CD-Bookshel]

Why not take all of the bands that submit work that aren't chosen for iTunes and throw them up on something like indie.iTunes.com. You would get a wild indie following.

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:Not too shabby

[Jon Abbott]

Apple gets 34 and label gets 65 according to several articles I've read.

That's where our calculations differ -- I was assuming almost the opposite -- that Apple was getting 60%, while the label got 40%... I guess I remembered the ratio inversely.

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. :^)

CD Baby is good!

[Anonymous Coward]

This "anonymous" coward is an artist with a web site at CD Baby - http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/narcolepticpianist to be exact. I can tell you this: There is no indie music distributor around that gives a better deal to the artist, whether it be in CD or digital format. They truly give the independant artist a chance (and the money that goes with said chance!). That's the reason they're the second largest indie distributor on the internet, second only to Amazon. But you have to take them for what they are. A statement above suggested that CD Baby should not be receiving 9% of income from downloads. Why? If all someone is selling is downloads and not CDs, then CD Baby is giving that artist free warehouse room, a free ticket onto itunes, and a free website. CD BABY IS A BUSINESS. I for one do not want them to lose profit. Also, the itunes (et al) option of downloading music is NOT required. All CD Baby is doing is giving artists the CHOICE to have more distribution, more sales, and overall, more of a chance of and for their album. They don't have to take it if they don't feel it's right for them. On the other side of things, I can tell you from reading the member boards inside cdbaby.net that we're all curious to see how Apple handles quality control, and fairness between indies and labels. Here's hopin' for the best!