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

[darkov]

What are the chances apple will accept them though?

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

[vasqzr]

There would be labour overhead and storage costs for each album.

A couple of Apple RAID Xserves should fix the storage issue.

Re:Great for highschool bands

[jared_hanson]

Apple definately needs a solution to keep the quality of the selection resonably high. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for variety of choice, and I fully support independant bands. However, I would hate to see iTMS turn into a place where there is a bunch of crap music, sort of like MP3.com. No one will buy music there if they have to wade through sludge to find a choice indie band.

Re:Great for highschool bands

[MarcQuadra]

Maybe a moderation system is in order?

Re:Great for highschool bands

[PetWolverine]

They could rate them based on reviews, and you could sort them by that.

Re:Great for highschool bands

[u-235-sentinel]

I'm all for this. iTunes is an awesome service and seems to be growing in leaps.

I wonder however. How long before the RIAA get's wind of it and threatens to sue?

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

[Cruciform]

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.

Re:Great for highschool bands

[way2trivial]

how much server space does a CD's worth of MP3's take? 30 megs? at that volume, how much does storage cost per megabyte to have and maintain?

please..

Re:Great for highschool bands

[darkov]

Maybe a moderation system is in order?

I can see my tracks getting modded -1, Troll

Re:Great for highschool bands

[EddWo]

Sounds like my comments here

Re:Great for highschool bands

[Azureflare]

Maybe have a rating system, so that all the crap slowly sifts to the bottom? It's worked for a lot of sites, and I could see it working for iTunes as well.

They could also have a cordoned off section of "indie" type stuff, so people wouldn't even have to look at it if they didn't want to. I think it'd be great, for the artists, the users of iTunes, and Apple too.

How much does storage go for these days? Storage is dirt cheap, and much, MUCH cheaper than producing real CDs.

Re:Great for highschool bands

[donmontalvo]

wait a minute...why does apple need to control this? freedom is what this is all about. folks who want to download mp3's search through an amazing selection...which is what this is all about. if you know what you want, you'll know what you should get. this is going to be a big boon for the world's struggling artists. the only folks who should be panicking now are the fat cats that are milking the music industry gravy train...yes...the same engine that's depriving some pretty awesome talent from ever being able to lift their foot off the ground. this is awesome...bring on the new music!!! don montalvo, nyc

Re:Great for highschool bands

[mechaZardoz]

There are a lot of things that Apple could conceivably implement, rating systems based on number of sales and previews, user-ratings.

But the key for this to work is the same rule that applies to brick-and-mortar stores: promotion. If people aren't aware of music (and there's so much that they will quickly be overwhelmed) they'll never buy it.

Three things they might consider:

1. general band-of-the day promotions

2. amazon-style recommendations based on buying/listening/user-defined choice

3. instead of pop-ups, borrow something from audiogalaxy and offer a mix of new music from user-selected categories of interest that would appear on the page for a customer to browser; keeping people in a store or on a web-site and engaged increases the likelihood that they'll buy something

4.or, streaming music with links to the band on the web site

Re:Great for highschool bands

[scrawny]

what is it about $40 that is going to make the music any better? the mp3.com crowd hasn't had a place to go in a while, so bets are on that it's the same bands and most often the same songs. sorry to disappoint.

as far as choosing which bands to include on ITMS, they can just use the existing queries...has [your pathetic band from yorkville] been requested or searched-for? probably not.

distribution is often free with a 40-50% artist commision. i know this is true in big markets. check your weekly rag for replication deals that include distribution for free. spend your $40 on flyers/posters/booking agent bribing/promoters/whatever.

how do you know you're wading through sludge if you've never heard of these bands? you going to listen to 30 seconds of thousands of songs to back that up? isn't sludge variety?

i fully support independent bands. very few people ever mean that sincerely.

Re:Great for highschool bands

[msimm]

I would hate to see iTMS turn into a place where there is a bunch of crap music, sort of like MP3.com

Who's to say whats crap? They have a lot of music that I don't care for, but then I've been turned on to more great music through mp3.com then any other single source. I like what CDbaby is doing and hope to see them forming more partnerships, preferably with sites like emusic.com who have stayed away from the DRM stuff.

Re:Great for highschool bands

[Gherald]

I don't think you understand how hard it would be too sort through the muck with everything crammed together like the words in your post.

Re:Great for highschool bands

[nolife]

Your "sludge" may be anothers gold mine. Not everyone shares the same interests. Most of what I listen to, many people have never heard or care to hear again. So be it. Might not be a blockbuster but to ignore it would hit the heart of the RIAA plan of music control (fabricate a few big stars to limit the advertising and production costs). That is the whole reason indies exist and are getting more popular.

Having more does not mean having less. I agree that a FIFO policy would not be very effective but a LFUDA replacement policy would be more logical but only required if they are short on space. $40 should easily cover storage expenses for 65MB of files.

Re:Great for highschool bands

[chundo]

Apple may not accept them, but this also covers a bunch of other distribution channels. Emusic is big with indie music fans, so I would imagine it's a little easier for CDBaby to get artists on there. Plus, they offer more consumer-friendly practices, like selling plain MP3's with no DRM.

-j

Re:Great for highschool bands

[stonecypher]

can Apple swallow the cost of thousands of albums sitting on their hard disks?

Well, let's see. That other music service was making a big del about 100,000 more albums. My MP3 albums generally weigh in at around 85 meg; let's go for the worse side, and call them 90.

Pricewatch currently lists 160gig drives for $114, or about 1.40g/$ . Granted, Apple can almost certainly get them cheaper, what with its bulk of trade and so forth, but let's just say you were the one. ;) If you want 100,000 albums, at 90 meg each, you're looking at 9,000,000 meg, or 9000 gig, or 9t.

That works out to about $6,500 for 100k albums, or rougly 35% of their current hold. Plus enclosures, that's probably in the neighborhood of a Hyundai.

Yes, I believe Apple can afford that. That's about what they charge for a printer, these days.

(Bandwidth is another issue, but if you're talking about things that are gonna just stagnate on the hard drives - Engelbert Humperdink, for example - then bandwidth is a nonissue.)

Re:Great for highschool bands

[chundo]

RIAA is irrelevant here. The copyright holders of the music are directly authorizing CDBaby to distribute their music. The RIAA is not involved in any way.

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 sort of convenient digital music service must be illegal on some level.

-j

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:Great for highschool bands

[Jafafa Hots]

They should accept anything, maybe with the condition that you pay for then storage, perhaps allowing you to choose your host, etc. That way, they could be like the eBay of downloadable music. It would seem like this would be profitable.

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

[darkov]

That works out to about $6,500 for 100k albums

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

[grub]

Maybe a moderation system is in order?

As long as they have a +1 Motorhead option you can count me in!

Re:Great for highschool bands

[dr.badass]

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.

Judging by the highschool and college bands I've known, I think about 1 in 100 will break even with that deal. CDs have a much higher profit margin, especially when you duplicate (or even record) them yourself. If you're worried about the cost of duplication, you'd faint at the cost of recording) And you can actually hand them to people when you perform live, or sell them via CDBaby's normal service.

You wouldn't be reaching a larger audience, either. iTunes is a music store, not a music discovery service. The design really isn't geared toward finding artists you've never heard of.

It seems like this is what they wanted from that conference they held with the Indie labels.

I think that what you're describing is exactly something they don't want. They explicitly mentioned that they will deal only with record labels, and not individual artists. I imagine that this is largely for legal reasons, but I think a side benefit is that it will help keep the service from becoming flooded with crap that nobody wants. CDBaby is attempting to work around this, and it's not clear to me that Apple, or any of the other services, won't have a problem with this.

Re:Great for highschool bands

[Cyno01]

mmm, you can really taste the motorheadand if you have no idea what i'm talking about google wmse radio roast

Re:Great for highschool bands

[u-235-sentinel]

No offense taken. My point simply was the RIAA isn't in control of this and has the attitude to crush everything and everyone.

I don't believe this service to be illegal. From looking at their web site and checking around It sounds like they are clean. Heck, I didn't even know about the rhapsody option avaialble. I knew iTunes was around though I'm told iTunes is for Apple users only (is this right?)

Rhapsody btw is a windows client. Oh well.. nobodies perfect ;-)

Re:Great for highschool bands

[jared_hanson]

You're first paragraph raised a very insightful point. Then you had to go and push your own adjenda with the following statements:


And now you want to give the seperation of wheat from chaff to people with the sense of taste to make the round translucent green line of personal doorstops?

"Hi, I'm a Macintosh, and I'm nonthreatening because I look edible. Won't you please write software for me? ... that's okay, neither will anyone else, I don't hate you. Gumdrops don't hate."


Just guessing, but I'd place money the troll moderation comes from that.

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

[stonecypher]

Heh. Making fun of macs isn't an agenda. It's a holy calling. :D

In the meantime, since when does a post with a salient point and some sarcasm deserve a trolling? I smell metamoderation.

Re:Great for highschool bands

[cens0r]

But remember that the economies of scale have come into play. They've already fronted the costs of aquiring the infastructure (somewhere to house them, management, backup systems, power, cooling, etc). Adding a couple of terrabytes of storage won't increase the costs all that much.

Re:Great for highschool bands

[cens0r]

This doesn't stop them from selling cd's at their shows. They can still record and duplicate their cd's themselves. But they can also have postcards at the shows with their logo and a list of URL's where you can purchase their stuff online. If you've already shouldered the cost of recording and mastering a CD to sell, the $40 is a drop in the bucket and surely couldn't hurt.

Re:Great for highschool bands

[Catnapster]

Your "sludge" may be anothers gold mine. Not everyone shares the same interests.

You gold mine may be another's sludge. mp3.com is loaded with bands that are fairly "specialized" and don't have the mass appeal that more mainstream artists do. Everyone who goes to mp3.com is likely to see a lot of what they consider sludge, even though there are a bunch of people who think that sludge is the best music ever.

So in other words, you're both right: a lot of the "sludge" is well-liked by somebody, but since it doesn't appeal to everybody, any one person is likely to think of it as sludge.

Re:Great for highschool bands

[chundo]

iTunes is Apple only, for now. If you like Indie music (CDBaby's market), try emusic.com - they're also on CDBaby's distribution list. They sell MP3's with no DRM, and have download clients for Windows, Mac and Linux. Not many popular (RIAA) artists in their library, but if you're like me you don't listen to those anyways...

-j

Re:Great for highschool bands

[strAtEdgE]

Even if they fully automate the submission process, can Apple swallow the cost of thousands of albums sitting on their hard disks?

If I can, why can't they?

Re:Great for highschool bands

[CyberKnet]

The meta-mod rarely ever works. You lose all context, and a sarcastic remark really can seem trollish, and trollish post really can seem insightful. I.e. anything PhysicsGenius posted of yonder can seem insightful when on its own, but in context it is very obviously a troll.

Go ahead and mod me down... It still wont change the system.

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

[MarcQuadra]

that's why the moderation system could be weighted to the number of downloads of the song, maybe it could be represented as a percent of downloaders who would recommend it to others. Britney would have %95, as would Brian Eno, but CrapFestJamShack out of some kids basement wouldn't be so successful.

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

[stonecypher]

You lose all context, and a sarcastic remark really can seem trollish

I agree with you here. I kinda wish that context were automatically provided, instead of needing to be requested.

Then again, if I had to read that much to metamoderate, I just wouldn't do it. So... whatever. :D

Re:Great for highschool bands

[Joey7F]

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

Yeah I know, it IS refreshing, but I still would feel better if I saw a 'fucktard' or two. :\

--Joey

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.

Re:Great for highschool bands

[darkov]

Oh my god, someone that argues pleasantly and without slander? Am I still on slashdot?

For some reason, I'm in a good mood today. Don't worry it won't last.

But, costs aside, you may have a point - iTunes could be a great resource for accessing any music you could ever want, and crack the market wide open for the benefit of all but another poster made the point about the signal to noise ratio. iTunes may be inundated with not-so-great bands making the service hard to use and I know Apple care about usability and perceived quality. It's a fantastic opportunity if Apple play their cards right.

Re:Great for highschool bands

[dr.badass]

The post I was responding to specifically mentioned the idea of download sales instead of duplicating CDs. Thank you for not reading it, and thank you more for making the idea even dumber.

Your idea gives the potential buyer these options: 1) Buy the CD right there, right now, in all of it's uncompressed glory; or, 2) Go home and download a compressed copy.

Why would someone go and download it? Because it's cheaper? Congratulations, you've just undercut yourself, and made CDBaby $40 + 9% (+$35 if you're not already on CDBaby).

So, for the aspiring unsigned band, you've just paid for the privilage of cutting into your own CD sales, making other people money, and maybe marginally expanding your audience.

Personally, I think I'd rather have 50-100 extra CDs to sell.

Re:Great for highschool bands

[overunderunderdone]

"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?

Not only would that be pure marketting gold but "The iTunes Music Store now with 10 million songs!" is also a valuable thing. Sure very few people will want Angry Metal Fishnipple's latest song but the fact that you KNOW the iTunes store will have a song you're looking for no matter how obscure is a great selling point. The existance of obscure, never downloaded music sitting on their servers will probably win them a LOT of business for middle tier artists that are quite a bit more popular and profitable. The customer will be reasoning "Well, Strawberry's might have this sorta obscure band, but I know Apple will have it."

Re:Great for highschool bands

[dbrutus]

You never actually looked at iTunes, did you? They have this fun little thing called a smart playlist. I'm sure that you could, with very little effort, create a smart buy list that brought up all pan flute folk songs from the Balkans if that's what you're in the mood to buy or acid metal from Japan if that floats your boat today, listen to a few samples and spend your $0.99 getting something you never heard of before and might have never found with conventional searching.

The wading through sludge problem is 90% solved already if you weren't too technologically bigoted to actually see what they're doing. Oooh it's a Mac and therefore I must hate it even if it offers cool technology, makes life simple and lets me do things that I just can't do on other platforms like a universal scripting language (applescript) that can script GUI and CLI applications including ones that the software writer didn't intend for it to be scriptable (UI scripting). I can't wait for X11 to become scriptable.

Re:Great for highschool bands

[dbrutus]

OK, well let's assume Apple's going to eat their own dogfood. They've got a nice RAID that they sell, 3U with a max capacity of 2.52T for $11k, four of those babies come out to $44k and you'll need servers to go with that, let's say 8 X-Serves clustered. Their cluster configured system run $2.8k so there's another $23k so for $67k you actually get something decently functional in 20U of rack space to push out to Akamai which will do the heavy lifting of actually serving all that stuff out to the music buying masses just waiting for good old Engelbert to become available on this new distribution method.

Re:Great for highschool bands

[dbrutus]

It's already done, just look at smart playlists with open eyes and you can see how easy it is to turn them into smart buylists.

Re:Great for highschool bands

[u-235-sentinel]

Excellent!

I'll check it out. Especially because they have the linux client.

Thx

Re:Great for highschool bands

[gryphokk]

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.

As opposed to the way it is now?

Re:Great for highschool bands

[cens0r]

What if some kid doesn't have the $8 at the show to purchase the CD? What if he wants to turn on a friend to the band? I didn't say that the postcard only had URL's to download the songs, you could also have the CDBaby website to buy the whole CD. You're just giving people options. I don't see how the $40 is a huge investment.

Take this scenerio you have your CD on CDbaby for $9.95 and iTunes also for $9.95. If someone downloads it, apple takes a 35% cut and then CDBaby takes their 9%, leaving you with $5.89. If they actually purchase the CD from the website CDbaby takes a $4 cut leaving you with $5.95. Not a huge difference. Then take in the fact that you actually have to pay to master every single physical CD that is sold on the website, and at production runs of 1000 or less that's at least $1 per disc. In that scenerio selling the MP3's actually earns you more cash then selling the music from the website.

Now I realize selling the albums from your show earns you the most profit (which is also why I buy CD's at shows whenever I have the oppertunity). But there are reasons you want your music avaliable in other locations. Lets say I see a great show. I buy the disc and start playing it for my friends. They love it. Now if they only have physical CD's and the only place to get them is at their shows, my friends are just out of luck or are going to have to copy my disc. But if the band has their disc on CDBaby they can go download it or a few songs or buy the whole physical media. I can't be undercutting myself, because those customers wouldn't have bought anything if I hadn't had those options available.

The other problem is that people are looking at this in purely a money fashion. This is about more than the money. Being a closet musician myself, I know that at the level most of these guys are at there is no chance of them turning a large profit on this kind of thing. What you're really trying to do is get as many people as possible just to hear your music. That's the only way you're going to get enough following to actually get big enough to make money. Having your music in a lot of different places makes getting heard easier. Especially when all those places also provide free previews.

Re:Great for highschool bands

[gryphokk]

You never actually looked at iTunes, did you? They have this fun little thing called a smart playlist. I'm sure that you could, with very little effort, create a smart buy list that brought up all pan flute folk songs from the Balkans if that's what you're in the mood to buy or acid metal from Japan if that floats your boat today, listen to a few samples and spend your $0.99 getting something you never heard of before and might have never found with conventional searching.

Yes, actually I use iTunes as my principal music listening environment. I use both static and smart playlists extensively.

Now, since you are the second to bring this up in this thread, I'm obviously the ignorant one here. So please enlighten me: exactly how can I use the Smart Playlists to view the iTunes Music Store selections?

From the iT help file: Playlists can include songs or spoken word files from your library or from radio stations. (emphasis mine)

I don't find any obvious way to link a Smart Playlist to the iTMS. Great idea, though!

Re:Great for highschool bands

[gryphokk]

Now, since you are the second to bring this up in this thread,

My error, I see now that you were the suggestor in both posts.

Re:Great for highschool bands

[blogeasy]

This is what it's all about. Direct to the consumer.

Re:Great for highschool bands

[blogeasy]

Sounds like a good idea. It's exciting to finally see these types of services being offered now. It was only a matter of time. Markets are changing faster than ever now and consumers have a more direct route to their suppliers. Hope it continues.

Re:Great for highschool bands

[dr.badass]

This is about more than the money.

Yeah, yeah, I know. It's about being heard, and expressing your artistic vision, and impressing chicks, and having something to do when you get trashed with your buddies.

But when it comes to spending any amount, it's about money and the aspiring musician's oft-mistaken belief that spending more of it will earn them more of it.

If it's all about getting heard by as many people as possible, bands should do what I did with my EP and write "Please copy the fuck out of this." on each disk, instead of worrying about being able to sell them to people any time, any where. It may not cover every scenario, but I reckon that the same kind of people that have internet access and a credit card stand a good chance of having a CD burner, and the total cost to me is $0.

--

What if some kid doesn't have the $8 at the show to purchase the CD?

If the kid doesn't have $8, he probably doesn't have a credit card, either. Also, any smart touring band will sell (at cost if neccessary) a few copies to a local independent record store before they leave town ("If you don't have $8 now, you can get it at XYZ Records.") -- this is common practice. It's cheap for the artist, doesn't require a computer or credit card, and supports local record shops. It's not as though there's going to be a lot of demand for your CD outside of the towns (or town for non-touring bands, like the highschool bands this thread started on about) you play in.

You're just giving people options. I don't see how the $40 is a huge investment.

Remember: It's $75 if you're not already using
CDBaby. For that you have no guarantee that the services will accept your music, no refund if they don't, plus the cost of producing, packaging, and mailing a supply of CDs to CDBaby, where they may or may not sell, and if they do it will only be to people with internet access and a credit card.

Take this scenerio...

Yes, take that scenario and count on it occuring 15 or more times before you make any money at all.
Also factor in the particular requirements of the services CDBaby mentions : iTunes requires a Mac, Rhapsody requires a continual subscription. All of this assuming that the services accept your music, which is yet to be seen. CDBaby seems perfectly willing to take your money now, though.

Re:Great for highschool bands

[cens0r]

I don't see why any unsigned band wouldn't be on CDBaby. If you have a CD, $35 is a good investment to start selling it online. Think of all the trouble you'd have to go through to sell it yourself : creating a e-commerce website, getting the ability to take credit cards, shipping each individual order, etc. CDBaby does all that for you. And if you want to sell each CD at cost, you can do that, just tell CDBaby you want the price to be your cost + $4. So really it is only a $40 investment.

Re:Great for highschool bands

[dbrutus]

I don't think you're going to be the one to fix this, Apple will, or they'll put out an iTunes SDK and a 3rd party developer will do it. All that needs to happen is the database the iTMS search function is searching against needs to be accessible via smart buylists. Making the database available is a pretty trivial problem.

Re:Great for highschool bands

[anti-drew]

OK, well let's assume Apple's going to eat their own dogfood.

Speaking of which, that's another rather nice way for Apple to ameliorate the cost. Since Apple develops its own RAID hardware and servers, they naturally spend money on testing the hardware to find bugs.

So using Apple hardware to serve everything would kill two birds with one stone... and the cost can be spread among the testing budget as well as the iTMS budget. The XServe and OSX Server teams get nice real-world testing data, and iTMS gets pretty much the best server support you could ask for, straight from the people who designed the hardware.

No, please don't.

[Anonymous Coward]

I really don't wanna hear you guys sing.

Methinks...

[Spazntwich]

that pudge is harboring some ill will from a previous failed attempt at a career in indie music.

Re:Methinks...

[krow]

The cat makes him do it..

Re:Methinks...

[gsfprez]

no.

he's bitchy because he's getting harrased by 19 year old know nothings on a BBS (not /.) he seems to spend half his time on. ;-)

he's right, they're wrong, but they seem to be "winning" because they are politically correct, while being dumb as toast.

pudge ain't the most politically correct guy alive.. so its making him irritable.

as for the cat - he doesn't let the dogs in his office any more.. i couldn't tell you about the cat. iChat EXTREME him, and ask him to pan the camera around. ;-)

We'll see

[TopShelf]

The trick will be how these guys work with the iTunes and Buy.com's of the world, and whether they actually offer anything of value. Compared to this setup, though, it does sound like an opportunity for artists to get a bigger slice of the pie...

Re:We'll see

[TopShelf]

Go check out the CDBaby website, and you'll see that they haven't hooked up with those services. They're pitching to obtain digital distribution rights, with no firm outlet channels as of yet.

Silly coward - you trust what the editors put in the title???

In other news ...

[bigjocker]

It has been anounced today that the long expected album "CowboyNeal in the Tub / Greatest Hits" will hit the digital shelves any time this week

$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

[FatRatBastard]

I assume the 91% is of the "distributer" cut of the iTunes pie (which, if memory serves, is around 30c)

Re:$40 an album seems cheap

[mattrix2k]

You get 91% of whatever Apple gives CD Baby, which is unlikely to be $1

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:$40 an album seems cheap

[hamsterboy]

IIRC, Apple's cut is 50% of original sale. CD Baby probably takes 9% of the original sale price, leaving the artist with 41%. Still much better than Sony.

Hamster

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.

Re:$40 an album seems cheap

[Johnny Mnemonic]

Apple's cut is closer to 20-30%. It's not clear to me if CD Baby will take 9% of the retail price, or 9% of the cost to them; not a bad deal either way.

As to Apple only allowing selected bands: I haven't gotten that impression from anything that I have read. Indies might be hard to find in the store, as they won't get promoted, but I think that they'll be there come one come all. It's just that the labels are invite only.

Re:$40 an album seems cheap

[SeattleGameboy]

I'll tell you what. You give me $20 (1/2 of CDBaby) and your digital distribution rights and I will guarantee your album will do just as well as it would have with CDBaby.

I used to work at a failed digital music distribution company and what CDBaby is claiming is absolutely a JOKE! Storage and maintenance is not cheap for sites like ITune. Unless there is a reasonable expectation for demand, this is not a business proposition that ANYONE like ITunes would go along with. Only reason places like ITunes carrry less than popular titles is because they come from a distributor as part of their entire catalog package (take are slow sellers with our best sellers). Why would Buy.com or ITunes take no name junk from somebody like CDBaby when they don't have other "Hot" titles to even things out???

Re:$40 an album seems cheap

[overunderunderdone]

Storage and maintenance is not cheap for sites like ITune.

I really want to know. Why? It seems to me Apple could just put the info about the artist and the songs in their database and a file on a hard drive and that's it. Storage is cheap, computers are cheap, especially for the manufacturer. Bandwidth is only a cost if people are listening to and thus at least interested in *buying* that song. So what's expensive? It's not like they're paying through the nose to rent storage space on someone elses server. It's their own system.

It seems to me the problem would not be any cost associated with storing a bunch of junk not many people access but in possibly diluting your own brand by having any low quality music.

Reading about what Jobs vision for iTunes is it sounds like he is not concerned about storing lots of obscure (but reasonable quality) titles. He wants to get into the big 5 distributors archives to get millions of out of print titles as well. iTunes would have any song you ever might want, so what if only a small handful of people ever download a particular song? It's only (cheap) hard disk space.

Re:$40 an album seems cheap

[eoyount]

I didn't mean it costs $44 to make a record, that's ridiculous. What I meant was that for a mere $40 you can try one more outlet for your music. It would only take $44 in revenue from that source for it to pay for itself.

Re:$40 an album seems cheap

[Llywelyn]

> I'll tell you what. You give me $20 (1/2 of CDBaby) and
>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 actually) a 70 min album costs approximately 70 MB.

For *us* cost per GB on an XServe RAID is $4.36, or 0.00436 cents per MB. That means it would cost them about 31 cents to host the song, assuming that they pay what we do for memory (which, for a point, they don't--they get the machines at cost).

Yes, there are other issues (like the server to host them, &c), but these are not insurmountable obsticals when you can make storage that cheap.

> Why would Buy.com or ITunes take no name junk from
> somebody like CDBaby when they don't have other "Hot"
> titles to even things out???

Because CD-Baby is signing a contract with them and I think that just about anything that CD-Baby submits, they will host in accordance with that contract.

Re:$40 an album seems cheap

[stonecypher]

If it's only costing you 44 dollars to make a record, I don't want to hear it.

Gee, someone's angry at soundforge. Oh, by the way, $100,000 of recording and your garage band still sucks. Next time spend it on lessons.

Re:$40 an album seems cheap

[stonecypher]

Storage and maintenance is not cheap for sites like ITune.

Er. What's so difficult about the phrase "Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks?"

Or did you not remember that hard drives get cheaper every twenty seconds? Many companies fail because they jump the gun, you know. Apple may well foot the bill just to sweeten the numbers on their catalog.

$114=160g. 9t=~$6500. +enclosure ~= $9-10k. Steve Jobs farts that kind of money. Bandwidth and electricity would be hella worse, but if the tracks are completely stagnant...

Re:$40 an album seems cheap

[SeattleGameboy]

"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." Where on CDBaby site say they have ANY relationship with ANYBODY??? Sure, I can tell you I have a contract with Apple - I would be as valid as CDBaby. What makes you "strongly" suspect anything? The independents that Itunes talked about are respected independent publisher who have strong track record of publishing niche items with small but loyal followings. Most ANYONE involved in music know several high-quality independents, NOBODY knows who CDBaby is, nor do they have ANY track record. Storage is not cheap, everyone is talking about the initial cost, but initial cost is not what kills you, maintenance is the beast. Even if it costs $1.00 per album per month to keep the album available (electricity, server room, etc.) that means that you need to sell at least 2 or 3 songs a month to make it worthwhile. Now multiplied that by thousands, and you will see the reason why it does not pay to carry these titles. We had a deal with three major labels where we carried about 3000 titles/label. Out of those only about 10% were regularly accessed. over 50% were almost NEVER accessed. But carrying the entire catalog made sense since overall, the hot-sellers made up for the slow-movers. Somebody like CDBaby with NO TRACK RECORD will have NOTHING but slow-movers. Why bother?

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.

Re:$40 an album seems cheap

[Llywelyn]

Wow, impressive lack of the use of the enter key.

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 /. article</a>

<a href="http://cdbaby.net/itunes">This is on their website</a>

So either:
1) This business plan is unsubstantiated (i.e., they have not signed a contract), but they were offered one, turned it down, and are making this offer anyways.

2) They have a contract.

>What makes you "strongly" suspect anything?

The two above links--you can get the original fulltext of the article in the comments section.

> NOBODY knows who CDBaby is, nor do they have ANY
> track record.

They have existed since c. 1998 and, while I haven't used their services personally, everyone I know who has used them has liked them and their services.

You are also going well past whether iTMS would support this, which is your original point.

>Even if it costs $1.00 per album per month to keep the
>album available (electricity, server room, etc.) that means
>that you need to sell at least 2 or 3 songs a month to
>make it worthwhile.

Considering the number of songs that Apple has been seeling when they are hit an optimistic 3-5% of the market (once you factor in the Mac and the Software running on it), and they are releasing to the rest of the world in the next 6 months, I would say this is a non-issue.

I'm also going to guess that Apple thought of this when it sent the invitation out to the independent labels and worked it into their business plan.

I don't know whether they are going to turn-down offerings, or it it is in their contract at all to do so, but I strongly suspect that they can maintain it or have accounted for this possability.

> Somebody like CDBaby with NO TRACK RECORD will
> have NOTHING but slow-movers.

Yet they (obviously) have bothered to invite them to the invitation only conference and CDBaby has managed to stay in business for 5 years by selling physical CDs this way.

Re:$40 an album seems cheap

[mrogers]

iTunes would have any song you ever might want, so what if only a small handful of people ever download a particular song? It's only (cheap) hard disk space.

I don't know why but I'm picturing an enormous 40-foot-high iPod sitting in an aircraft hangar outside Cupertino...

Re:$40 an album seems cheap

[dbrutus]

Your music has to be encoded and submitted to Apple in their special format. $40 should cover the fellow typing in all the fields and making sure the encoding software works right. This is not even close to self-publishing. Unsigned authors probably spend more than $40 on postage and duplication to get their work to an agent and publisher who will work for 'free'.

Re:$40 an album seems cheap

[Tokerat]

I can't tell if you're being sarcastically optimistic or not, but compared with the 59 cents or less that most artists make off $20 CD sales, I'd say yea, this is a really sweet deal for everyone involved.

Re:$40 an album seems cheap

[minghe]

Yeah, but about a thousand albums/year ain't impossible, provided the band is good enough, and knows how to market themselves at gigs, fanzines, on the web etc.

One thousand 12 track albums sold = 12000 tunes.

12000 tunes * $0.59 = $7080
(Is't there some kind of Full Album discount at iTunes?)

Not enough to quit the day job, but it would pay an amp or two, plus plenty of time in a studio.

Re:$40 an album seems cheap

[Gannoc]

So if you managed to sell a little over a million tracks, you'd pocket a cool $600,000 dollars or so.

And if you sold a billion, you'd make six hundred million dollars!

Therefore, it MUST be a great deal, because you can make six hundred million dollars!

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.

Re:What abount major artists

[Anonymous Coward]

You make a deal with the devil you get screwed. It's that simple.

Re:What abount major artists

[DrWhizBang]

This will allow new artists to get some payback without having to sign a contract in the first place. The one deadlock that the RIAA has is on distribution, and without that many artists would never have to sign with a label at all.

As for artists that have already signed, well, they're screwed.

Re:What abount major artists

[dhovis]

Actually, Ben Folds is offering three EPs this year that will be available:

• At concerts
• On Vinyl
• From Ben Folds' website
• The iTunes Music store

Part of the reason he is doing this it to avoid doing all the publicity BS that he would have to do if he released an album. He is also able to release the EPs outside his recording contract.

Re:What abount major artists

[Johnny Mnemonic]

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 think this is a great opportunity--don't get me wrong. But Britney isn't going anywhere.

Re:What abount major artists

[Misch]

Yeah, they do have to "sign a contract".

From the link:

there can't be more than one distributor bringing the same music to the same store so we have to be the exclusive distributor of your digital music to these services (only) during the contract

There's a $35 fee to set up a CD with CDBaby to begin with, and if you want this, there's $40 more to process, store, and then send to any digital music provider that they sign up with in the future.

If dhovis figures are correct, from straight up downloads through iTunes, an artist will have to sell 128 tracks to break even on the fees ($75/$0.59). Once they do that, however, everything they sell is pure gravy. Since they're all indie artists, there's no recouping left to be done (though they'll probably have a few expenses of their own to pay.)

Re:What abount major artists

[CoughDropAddict]

I don't doubt that advertisement is how music gets heard... now. Speaking as a music-lover and musician, though, I am not interested in being exposed to music through advertisement and I am not aware of any music that I have bought as a result of adversisement.

What I want is recommendations from people who have similar taste to me, even if I don't know them. I hope to see websites spring up where people can circulate opinions and word-of-mouth recommendations about what bands are interesting. These kinds of forums could also be integrated into existing distributors like CD Baby.

Looks like a good deal

[xyrw]

I have to say, it looks like CD Baby is being very fair to the artists with this deal. The artists can even sell their music via other means, just not to the same store, and they can end the contract with 30 days' notice.

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.

Re:Looks like a good deal

[Blue Stone]

I agree. It seems like what the world needs is more CD Baby-like outfits, who don't demand that a musician sells their souls to them in return for the ability to make a living out of their artistic talent.

Re:Looks like a good deal

[tanguyr]

CDBaby aren't doing this out of the goodness of their hearts - they're doing it because it's potentially very good for their bottom line. If your music sells no units they still have the profit off your fourty dollars. If you happen to be the next big thing, they have the 9% off your online sales. And at no risk whatsoever to themselves.

Clever.

/t

Great idea!

[Goldberg's Pants]

It's gonna take a BIG organization outside the RIAA to come up with a system to beat them. iTunes is a great idea, and this new way of selling music is a good idea, though I think $40 is a bit steep. I think they should have an option. You either pay $40 to get the album on there OR they take a higher percentage of the revenue. (Say 15% instead of 9%.)

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!

[Trigun]

$40 bucks is nothing when compared to getting a CD mastered. Let alone distribution costs. If the band can't fork over $40 bucks, then their music probably isn't worth the $0.99 download.

Re:Great idea!

[Goldberg's Pants]

True, but I still think there should be an option. Most muscians I've known have no money:) So having an option to get their music up without having to pony up the $40 would be a nice thing. I fail to see how not having $40 would equate to them not being worth paying for. Money != Talent.

Re:Great idea!

[cve]

Most of the bands submitting material will have little chance for comercial success. I'm sure CDBaby is just banking on the $40 up front. 15% of 0 is still o.

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?)

Re:Great idea!

[B3ryllium]

$40 could be made in half a day's busking, if they have an ounce of true talent.

Re:Great idea!

[Cecil]

If you can't manage to scrape together $40 to invest in your future, or get someone else to do it for you, you aren't talented, sorry. $40 is peanuts. Have one of the band members go get a McJob for a couple days. Jeez.

Re:Great idea!

[Trigun]

Most of the musicians, or artists of most sorts, which I know are broke as well.

Yet they have the best pot. Strange how that works.

Re:Great idea!

[HiThere]

This is no problem....well, not much of one.

The question is: Do they have a good indexing system? Can you find what you are looking for? If they do, then those who are decent can pick up a following. If not, then not.

I do wonder just how long they'll store the music on-line for $40. What's really wanted is an archive, so that music with an value doesn't get lost. And with any value is quite a difficult parameter to measure. Fashions change, so what's not worth anything today may be a true masterpiece tomorrow. (Example: Shakespear was for a century or so considered too low brow to be worth consideration. Then only the histories were worthwhile plays. Now "MidSummer Night's Dream" is considered one of his better plays. And he's considered a master of the art.)

Re:Great idea!

[FatRatBastard]

Most muscians I've known have no money:)

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!

[cve]

I think this is like a photographer taking pictures for a model's portfolio. They'll take anyone's pictures (and charge you for it) but they won't guarantee you'll get in a magazine. The photographer makes money either way.

Re:Great idea!

[scrawny]

there was a free service that had a HUGE following and hype all around it. they sent us checks and a couple tote bags and the exposure got us to a couple music meatmarkets for some A&R people.

it was mp3.com?

if you expect [your awesome destined for greatness band] to be all over one of Apple's pages, forget it. the reason CDBaby will take your $40 is because ~that is all they will make from you.~ ~you~ still need to get people to the ITMS or wherever else they promote. you'll make more money selling your cd's to your mom directly than having her go to some website.

spend your $40 on flyers or bribing the booking guy to play live instead. really.

Re:Great idea!

[haut]

$40 a lot??? I just finished recording a family friend and the amount he's spent on recording equipment (or if he had bought studio time) far eclipsed that amount. If your music isn't good enough to sell ~75 songs (about what it would take to break even) then you probably shouldn't bother. Also, that $40 buys you something: CDBaby doesn't just pocket it, they encode your album, send it to the company, and set it up for you. That sounds like a downright steal, even if they took 25% afterwards. Look at what most artists deal with when working with RIAA labels: unless they are enormously successful, they end up owing money to the record company. I think that at 9% (which calculated in an earlier post gives over 50% of the original sale to the artist) I'd feel very good about buying an entire album from a CDBaby artist. We need more labels like CDBaby and I honestly hope them the best of luck in destroying the business model of RIAA labels.

Re:Great idea!

[HiredMan]

Hence the old joke:

Q: What do you call a musician who just broke up with his girlfriend?

A:Homeless!

=tkk

Re:Great idea!

[Misch]

Yeah, but waht if it's a girl to begin with?

Re:Great idea!

[Zachary Kessin]

I think the $40 is to keep out joke stuff. Its not a lot of money and compaired to the cost of a good recording its nothing. But its enough to keep the average twit from posting an mp3 of themselves singing off tune into their computer mike or something like that.

As for the RIAA being dead by 2007 I would doubt it. They sitll have a lot of money that they can use to promote themselves and their artists etc. That promotion is estental to anyone who wants to be "big" whereas the average college acapella group or after work band that plans a gig once in a while for fun will probably find this a major help.

Re:Great idea!

[tedtimmons]

if you expect [your awesome destined for greatness band] to be all over one of Apple's pages, forget it. the reason CDBaby will take your $40 is because ~that is all they will make from you.~ ~you~ still need to get people to the ITMS or wherever else they promote. you'll make more money selling your cd's to your mom directly than having her go to some website.

Finally. Someone gets it. You are paying the $40 as a crap filter- a way of raising the bar a little to keep the sludge out. The main problem (you hit it on the head) is bands that think they are the Next Big Thing and they don't need to do anything.

Want to make it big on a mp3.com type site? Put your music up, and spend all of your time promoting your band. The site won't do that for you.

-ted

Re:Great idea!

[HiThere]

It's different from that because they are also selling the music (and taking a cut on any sales). And they're keeping the music "available for purchase". But there *is* a lot of similarity.

Re:Great idea!

[boboroshi]

Various friends in bands I know are about to or have spent between $20,000 and $30,000 JUST to record the album. Then hiring a top shelf mix engineer to mix it... then mastering. Even the cost of pressing 1000 copies is nothing in comparison to the amount of money they've spent to get a quality product.

Of course, I know people who've done the same thing and spent under $5k on recording. And the records don't sound quite so good.

Granted, I type this as my band is in pre-production to go in the studio with Ted Comerford and blow about $20k on tracking a ten song album.

But listen to a lot of local stuff, and you'll notice that it's missing that level of engineering and mixing that the general public is used to and now demands from most artists...

Re:Great idea!

[Alsee]

aht if it's a girl to begin with?

Then obviously it should be read as "boyfriend". Unless of course it's a group like T.A.T.U. and it would still be read "girlfriend".

-

Re:Great idea!

[BiggerIsBetter]

/me hopes his ex is reading this and figures shit out.

Re:Great idea!

[Hatta]

Strange? Where do you think the money goes?

Re:Great idea!

[Goldberg's Pants]

If you can't manage to scrape together $40 to invest in your future, or get someone else to do it for you, you aren't talented, sorry.

Sorry mate, but that's bullshit. This is US dollars. Taking into account exchange rates, that would equal probably around $70-$80 Australian. Where I live, that's a quarter of my monthly rent.

$40 may be peanuts to you, but it's not to everyone.

Re:Great idea!

[Goldberg's Pants]

I've heard indie bands that were local to me. The production was better than a lot of top name albums out there. For example, the Foo Fighter's last album (not their new one) sounded like it was being played through mud. Terrible production.

Unless you're getting a REAL top name to produce, you may as well do it yourself.

Re:Great idea!

[Goldberg's Pants]

If the band is 4-6 people, then fair enough, but what about solo artists? And as I've said above, exchange rates. If you're in a country whose economy is fucked (Argentina springs immediately to mind) $40 US is a BIG chunk of change, and I sure as hell don't want to hear yet another derivative rock band from America...

Re:Great idea!

[minghe]

Various friends in bands I know are about to or have spent between $20,000 and $30,000 JUST to record the album. ...

Of course, I know people who've done the same thing and spent under $5k on recording. And the records don't sound quite so good.

On the other hand, I know pepole who've done the same thing and spent just over $3k on recording. And belive me, it sounds just as good as anything you can pick up in your local cd store.

Specified, that was $1000 for a few days in a perfecly good studio (although a bit run down), $1500 for their studio software and a PC. Finally $700 paid to a professional mastering enginneer for the final touch.

With the right know-how, talent and most of all patience the cost for a professional sound does not have to skyrocket.

NPersonally, I can't even begin to imagine how I should do to burn 30000 dollars on recording an album, unless I had to hire a symphonic orchestra.

Please enlighten me.

Re:Great idea!

[LordBodak]

One very good band here in our area, the Jeff Greer Band, already sells their CD via CD Baby (as well as at shows). I hope they take advantage of this and get some more exposure.

Go forth, but cautiously...

[jeeves99]

I've never heard of CDBaby. Their website looks very shoddy, as if they used a very basic WYSIWYG editor. I would also like to know how picky apple is about taking music from the labels. Do they take anything the labels feed them or are they selective in their choices? If they'll take anything, then CDBaby looks like a fantastic way to get wide-spread distribution. If not, then you've just wasted $40 on a pipedream.

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

Re:Go forth, but cautiously...

[seasleepy]

I've never bought from them personally, but they sound like a bunch of people that really love music...very small record-shop-ish. (See the bonus free CD for returning customers.)
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...

[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: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...

Re:Go forth, but cautiously...

[daveo0331]

I ordered some music from CD baby and they're doing a much better job than you might think. Even if you know nothing about independent music you can find something you like. You can click on "search" and look for music that sounds like an [riaa] artist you like, then listen to samples (and the samples are 2 minutes, not 30 seconds like Amazon. No need to waste your money buying crap). Once you find something you like, they give you a couple recommendations. The recommendation engine isn't as sophisticated as Amazon, but it's a much faster way of finding new music than listening to Clear Channel. Also most of the CDs are $10 and most of that goes to the artist.

If you're looking for an alternative to funding the RIAA jihad (or just want to find some music that's interesting and original for a change), you should check these guys out.

Re:Go forth, but cautiously...

[Misch]

It's a great site. Artists get a url like this:
http://www.cdbaby.com/marthastrouble.

It's so easy to stick that on a post card. It also saves the band the hassles of having to go out and get a merchant account to accept credit cards. Sure, they take a cut of the sale to cover costs, but it's not too bad.

Re:Go forth, but cautiously...

[Just Some Guy]

Fair enough criticism regarding the look of their side, but I've bought music from them and been delighted with their service. At one point, I wrote to their contact email to give them my opinion about something or another, and got a long, thoughtful response from the president of the company. They take their service seriously.

Re:Go forth, but cautiously...

[Anonymous Coward]

Think their website looks shoddy? You must not have seen slashdot's main page.

Re:Go forth, but cautiously...

[ambisinistral]

Yea, well I just had the problem with them and I didn't hear a damn word from them until the artist intervened. Even after that, it was nothing but those sugary canned emails. Service sucked IMO.

Re:Go forth, but cautiously...

[cowboy junkie]

To counter that, I had an order where a CD was left out. I emailed them, and they sent it the next day, no questions asked. I got it the day after that.

I've ordered dozens of CD's from them and have had nothing but good experiences. But even if you don't choose to order from them, it's a great place to discover new artists you'll like. With two minutes samples of each song on an album and links to artist web sites that most often have complete songs, you get a much better taste than you do with a 30 second clip.

Re:Go forth, but cautiously...

[ambisinistral]

Well, that didn't happen to me two weeks ago. I never even got a message from anybody working there acknowledging the screwup... just thos canned marketing crappola responses. Heh, you can imagine how cheery I felt when I got their obnoxious little robo-sent "Did you get your CDs OK? Was everything perfect message?"

Uh, no... everthing WASN'T perfect, not that they showed any signs of caring any where along the line.

Any company can make a mistake, but it is outrageous to have to go to the artist to even get a CANNED response.

Re:Go forth, but cautiously...

[ambisinistral]

BTW, my mistake... it was Becky Barksdale, not Paula Battaglia who intervened. Sorry 'bout that.

Re:Go forth, but cautiously...

[ambisinistral]

Put this in the wrong thread earlier... my mistake, it was Becky Barksdale not Paula Battaglia who kindly intervened for me. Sorry 'bout the mixup.

Re:Go forth, but cautiously...

[Reece400]

If you really look at it... there aren't that many errors as compared to like.. 90% of the pages out there... especially compared to some major websites...
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fmic rosoft.com%2F&charset=iso-8859-1+%28Western+Europe %29&doctype=HTML+4.01+Transitional
or
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fw ww.google.com%2F&charset=iso-8859-1+%28Western+Eur ope%29&doctype=HTML+4.01+Transitional
and even the mistakes he has made are all minor things,, like using &, and adding some additional spaces in, and not putting in alternate text for images... all easy fixes.

Reece,

Re:Go forth, but cautiously...

[gse]

I've never heard of CDBaby. Their website looks very shoddy, as if they used a very basic WYSIWYG editor.

CD Baby rocks. My little label has a few titles for sale there (like the new Plink record -- go buy one!), and they've been nothing but great. They provide the best information of any web store I know of; they're very quick to pay us; and they're friendly. Their site design is a little ugly but hey, it's distinctive -- and the site is fast.

Re:Go forth, but cautiously...

[pressman]

With two minutes samples of each song on an album and links to artist web sites that most often have complete songs, you get a much better taste than you do with a 30 second clip.

Man, if they were selling Ramones albums, people could just download the samples because the average Ramone song is only about 90 or so seconds!

Screw that!

[EinarH]

I'm already hooked up to a major RIAA label for life you insensitive clod!

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:Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.

[Milo Fungus]

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.

There's a few groups out there trying, but it's really a difficult thing to do. One attempt (that I wasted a lot of time on ARGGG!) was Band-Mates.com. It was basically a review exchange for Mp3.com artists. You would review and rate songs from 1-5, in exchange for other artists doing the same with your songs. The more you review, the more reviews you get. Sounds good?

But there were some big problems with it:

1. For starters, I think the main creator guy got in a bit over his head. The site was always really buggy and it's never really been fixed. He didn't foresee the site growing so quickly, and it didn't scale very well.
2. The site desperately needed a meta-moderation system. I would get reviews that said something like "Your song is rubbish." How helpful is that? And the next review might be really positive. A meta-mod system would make the signal:noise ratio a lot more manageable.
3. (Related to 2) It was too easy to write terrible reviews. There were no consequences for writing bad ones. The review page asks you to write at least 25 words, but it doesn't check to make sure that you did.
4. It would be nice if you could link to your songs anywhere, not just Mp3.com. They only let you have a few song for free anyway. And only mp3 files allowed. Linking to an ogg on my personal website would be a good way to introduce random music lovers to better, more open formats.

Emergent Music was another one that didn't seem to be going anywhere. Sigh.

Re:Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.

[toganet]

What about a rating system based on whata you listened to, how much, and when?

Just thinking out loud here (er, well, I can hear the keyboard) -- but as a former experimental psychologist, the idea of an empirically-derived rating system has mucho appeal to me.

Re:Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.

[Luyseyal]

Christian music stores have had this feature like forever. "Band X sounds like Nirvana" or "Band Y sounds like Erasure". Helpful for sorting through all the dross since they publish so much crap. (There are some real gems though).

-l

Re:Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.

[Albanach]

So lets get this right. I can buy a Mac and use Itunes, or I can use a service that's been around for a year over at rhapsody.com where I can listen to all the music I want for £10 a month, burn CD's for 75c a track and get artists like Delirium. Where the artists aren't listed, rhapsody gives you a list of alternatives.

I'm sorry, the Itunes idea isn't new, is being done better and cheaper per track elsewhere, with a more extensive catalogue, jsut a smaller advertising budget.

Re:Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.

[thatguywhoiam]

What about a rating system based on whata you listened to, how much, and when?... Just thinking out loud here (er, well, I can hear the keyboard) -- but as a former experimental psychologist, the idea of an empirically-derived rating system has mucho appeal to me.

Yeah, me too. It's interesting to note that Apple has actually got a 'rating' system in iTunes, you choose between 1 and 5 stars (that represents graphically like you would expect.. its neat, you just slide the mouse across them). They've also gone to great lengths to make this feature very accessible - its under the contextual menu items, as well as on the new iPods themselves.

Makes you wonder if Apple could offer a discount in trade for your musical ratings data. I bet both parties would go for it, if it was anonymous.

Re:Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.

[skinfitz]

...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.)...

You are of course assuming that Apple will pick your track to distribute - this is not the case and it is mentioned on the CDBaby site - they will submit it for approval, however companies such as Apple are under no obligation to publish it.

Re:Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.

[TSTM]

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.

I surfed around the website a bit and it seems almost every one of the songs has a 'hi-res' mp3-version online, too. No realplayer needed.

novellty press

[Anonymous Coward]

Reminds me of those novellty press site like xlibris . For "only" a hundered dollars they would print your buck and get an ISBN number for you , of course no one would ever take books from them . The success of this service depends on how much influence they have with itunes and other music distribution channels , right now it just sounds like another cool way to get for bucks from morons .
By the way I'm launching a newservice , you send me money and I'll try and make you famous if other people think your good enough and if you become famous I want a 9% cut . I wont do much with the $40 except take your demo tape and rip it in mp3 and put them on kazaa ; but hey its good exposure?

Bunch of morons.
Note in a bad sense , morons are easy to get money from.

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.

Good Start

[Lord_Dweomer]

This is a good start I guess. Ultimately its still like having a label though. The artists should be able to go straight to Apple and take out yet another comapany that wants to play middleman.

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/buy your music. This is definitely progress although it still kinda gives me a feeling of 'one step forward, two steps back' with CDnow being the middleman instead of the labels.

Re:Good Start

[dialectro]

Do you have the contract signed with Apple to encode your songs with their DRM? I would be happy to pay a measly $40 and another measly 9% to have someone handle the business side of things with Apple (and others.)

Regardless though, unless the search and "You would also like" features are built better, Joe Schmoe is never gonna make much money on iTMS or anywhere else without distro into independent record stores and videos on MTV2...

Re:Good Start

[Lord_Dweomer]

"Do you have the contract signed with Apple to encode your songs with their DRM? I would be happy to pay a measly $40 and another measly 9% to have someone handle the business side of things with Apple (and others.)"

Which is why I don't get why Apple doesn't do exactly that. Why not take the $40 'entrance-fee' and then the 9% or w/e they want and make even MORE money? The only problem there would be that Apple would have a ridiculous amount of control unless they let everybody in who paid. Think of it as a music store with the power of Clear Channel at that point. Apple gets paid by someone to NOT have another band on there? *poof* they're gone, unless Apple leaves the doors completely open to everybody who wants to go for it (which I think is very likely given that this is Apple).

CD Baby Cares

[BeetMonster]

Here's the proof, came with my invoice:

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!

Re:CD Baby Cares

[Xerithane]

I'm from Portland. It's true. We have a ceremony every day at 3:36PM. It gets a bit crowded, but they also provide free dinners for us all. Afterwards, if you are over 21, they buy you a beer.

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

[Binestar]

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.

1999, Is that you?

Re:CD Baby Cares

[henele]

Then they put it into their RAID :)

No offence intended, I really respect what those/you guys are doing :)

Re:CD Baby Cares

[GPB]

No wonder Oregon has one of the highest (if not the highest) unemployment rate in the country!

-B

That Rules

[Erick the Red]

The main reason the RIAA still sells music, considering the music's quality, is that most people don't know there's someting better out there (most radio stations doesn't help). If some decent tracks are available on iTunes, and therefor get put beside popular music that's being searched by the "uneducated masses", people will be subjected to something that's good.

Re:Just Checking

[Paulrothrock]

We hate buymusic.com because its DRM is too oppressive, not to mention it's based on sub-par Microsoft technology that's already been cracked.

We like the iTunes Music Store because it uses reasonable DRM and a good format.

See the difference?

Re:Just Checking

[jared_hanson]

Get ready to be modded flamebait. Anyway, I just wanted to clarify your position. The DRM in buymusic.com is much, much more restrictive than that found in iTMS. Given the state of the industry, it is a pipe dream to even think that any store will get to license media from the big record labels without at least some DRM. Hence, we like Apple for getting the job done with the least invasive DRM possible. It is a lesser of two evils situation.

In your dreams...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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!

Re:In your dreams...

[Dan Ost]

Has Apple announced when iTunes for Windows will be available?

Re:In your dreams...

[AvantLegion]

Imagine Apple releasing a Windows version of iTunes. By the end of this year, even!

That'll really show this dumb AC!

Re:In your dreams...

[chundo]

Distribution isn't limited to iTunes. I read the information page on CDBaby, and there are several digital distribution networks they get you into, including EMusic.com, which is straight MP3's with no DRM. That'll work for 100% of people.

-j

Outstanding!!

[NetNinja]

I hope all the music bands out there succeed!
Here's to all the luck in the world for all the Indies out there.

Re:Just Checking

[irving47]

If you want to call it DRM, you're free to do so. I am NOT a big music listener, so I don't have the same perspective, but the restrictions on ITMS seem so light that they're only there at all to keep RIAA-types from complaining.

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

Re:cdbaby is good for the artist

[saddino]

Absolutely. My band has been selling our latest CD through cdbaby.com over the past year and we've always received timely checks and excellent service, as well as opportunities for more exposure (allowing part of our inventory to be sent as free "bonuses" for repeat cdbaby customers) -- which is more than I can say for other services we've tried.

Seeing that we're already a member, we figured an extra $40 was fair to see what happens with iTMS (and other online dist.).

IMHO, it's a great opportunity at a great price.

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?

This is a good start : Choices

[felonious]

It's nice to see this service starting to expand into indy music. I don't use the service but I support it because it's gives us all another choice. I think if they do a windows version then we'll really start to see an impact. You really can't lose with low prices and ease of use. Even if a person is anti-mac they can't deny that this service will be what the Ipod was to the old school mp3 players. I would also add that I am not a mac user but I can recognize quality no matter where it comes from.

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:Proper Job... Finally...

[gamgee5273]

I think it depends on how iTMS for Windows goes. If that is a smashing success, the RIAA will stick with Apple. Remember, the RIAA doesn't like change...

Re:Proper Job... Finally...

[filmsmith]

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...

Congratulations! Aparently all your moaining and wailing on Slashdot really paid off. Now if we could only convince all the other activists out there to stop taking to the streets and doing something and instead just posting their philosophies on here time and time again, maybe we could finally change the world!

Aaaaah, sweet, sweet sarcasm!

Distribution v/s marketing

[sgups]

So the artists have a somewhat fair distribution channel. They yet need to market themselves to make for people to download them and make a buck. And how would they do that? Lets also assume they have cheap means of recording their music - some software perhaps.

Industry Response

[American AC in Paris]

BuyMusic.com, a recently-launched competitor to Apple iTunes Music Store, announced today that they would begin distributing independent artists' work, much like CDBaby's newly unveiled distribution plan. Through BuyMusic.com, independent artists would see up to 99.9% profit per sale(1), with one-time setup costs as low as $30(2). Artists would receive their checks in as little as one week(3) after BuyMusic.com receives payment for the sale. Artists wishing to leave the service may be able to do so as quickly as within twenty days.(4)

(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.

Wait!

[msimm]

Thats what they did with my CD!

Looks like these guys want to be the cafepress

[TerryAtWork]

of audio.

Let's hope they do a better job of artistic managment then CP did.....

Re:Looks like these guys want to be the cafepress

[Tsuzuki]

Cafepress do audio, and they had to change their TOS because a select group of morons couldn't read.

The new TOS basically covered their arses from a customer whipping out the DMCA and whacking them with it. The new admin fees also ensure that you work hard to make good products and promote your store instead of being a waste of resources.

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?...

[teamhasnoi]

Uh, where do you think the source for the digital files comes from? What were you going to send them, mp3s? You must have the source files right? Burn them on a CD, have a (knowlegeable) pal do the artwork, and send it in. They will let you.

If 10,000 people order a CD, I'm sure you can find someone who wants a nice return on their money and front the bill for making them. Hell, I'll lend it to you (in exchange for a small fee, of course. ;)

Re:Not what it seems?...

[bustacap]

Weeding out the losers.

If you do not have the money from gig sales to pony up the CD production costs, and the $40 fee, then sorry, your music probably sucks and the online services are better without you and other no-talented musicians saturating the service.

Not that I am attacking you personally, but really, if one is serious about making music then there should be no issue in spending a few thousand bucks producing a studio quality CD.

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.

Re:Not what it seems?...

[medeii]

From CD Baby.net:

There is a one-time-ever $35 charge to set up a new CD in our store, with everything we described above. (It takes us about 30 minutes of work to put a new album into our system and website, that's why.)

Hardly seems like a $3,000 setup fee to me...

Re:Not what it seems?...

[treegnome]

I'm a college student... all money goes towards tacos and stuff... I can definitely afford $40, but not a few thousand to make a professional CD (I've always burned my own and stamped my own artwork onto it).... I come from a house of musicians, my father is a professional musician, so I had access to a professional studio to record... plus, I'm a singer/songwriter (read: solo act), so I don't have a "set band" (outside of my recordings, like Sarah McLachlan or Tori Amos) that is going to all pitch in for an album...

A digital-only distribution would be perfect for someone like me. If iTMS and others thought I sucked, they wouldn't have to accept me.

Re:Not what it seems?...

[nullard]

Apple's agreement with the smaller labels requires that all albums be real CDs with barcodes. This is part of why CD Baby can do this.

Re:Not what it seems?...

[DocTBone]

If you look through the fine print, CD Baby will accept CD-Rs, as long as they "look nice." If that includes home-printed labels, the barrier to entry is well below $3K.

Re:Not what it seems?...

[frightenedmonkey]

Ever recorded an album, mixed and mastered it, then gotten your cd's pressed? Leaving aside recording and mixing costs (usually taken together), mastering tacks on another few hundred dollars (although, if you're going to distribute in any way, you should be mastering), and then reproduction. Ugh. Usually, you have to get cds in batches of at least 1,000. Some places let you order 500, but raise the cost per CD.

My band is about to go back into the studio to record an EP, and we've worked a deal with the studio we like to use for about $2700 for the recording and mixing, which means we toss in for mastering. If we're lucky, we'll get a (good) friend to do cover art, saving us anything from $500 to $1000. Reproduction is usually somewhere around $1.50 per disc, which comes to $1500 for a batch of $1000. Since CDBaby requires a physical disc to get you into the iTMS, for us, that comes to about $4200. Oh, add in an extra $40 to get us into the iTMS.

That $4200 is the barrier to entry, not CDBaby's set up fees.

Of course, studio expenses vary (we like using a good studio with a good engineer), and you could print off a bunch of CD-R's and inserts on your computer, but no one's going to spend more than a few bucks on it, in fact, most bands I know that have gone that route have just given them away. Most people, including the indie rock crowd, generally prefer a reasonably professional looking CD. When was the last time you bought a CD-R from a local band? I never have, mostly because it screams crap.

Basically, to get real distribution, you need to invest in a real product to get peopel to buy it, and that looks like it's going to continue with regards to digital distribution.

Re:Not what it seems?...

[dhovis]

The cheapest CD Printer on the market is around $350.

Actually, the cheapest CD Printer on the market is the Epson Stylus Photo 900. It will print onto printable CDs and DVDs. At $199, it is well within the price range of the starving artist. Heck if you buy a 30 pack of printable CD-Rs ($15) at the same time, you get a $30 rebate.

Re:Not what it seems?...

[ibodog]

I did an indie release in 2000 of 100 CD's that cost me $300 to have someone print & dupe. I did the artwork myself. Turned out nice & was happily accepted at local CD stores.

What's the minimum # of cd's CDBaby requires you to stock with them?

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?...

[medeii]

If you're not prepared to spend a few $K on a hobby, it's probably not something you're truly interested in. My hobby is digital music, and accordingly, I've got upwards of $20K of equipment scattered around my house. Any hobby requires an investment of time, and money.

As for your figures above, I'm sure mastering is expensive. But it's a cost one must bear with if you want it done well, and so you'll just need to pay for it. You then quote reproduction costs for a thousand CDs, but CD Baby only requires one disc (and they didn't say it had to be professionally pressed, either.) You can buy CD-Rs that look decent, too, even if you don't write or print anything on them, and just get someone to print up some nice case inserts. One CD is all you need -- yet you're pricing for a thousand.

Re:Not what it seems?...

[chundo]

Just 5.

-j

Re:Not what it seems?...

[frightenedmonkey]

I wasn't trying to bitch about the cost of recording or mastering -- if, as a band, you want to do it, you better fucking do it the right way -- rather, my point was that, essentially, if you want to have a product for sale on CDBaby, there are certain barriers to entry, least of which is reproduction.

As far as a professional reproduction, well a lot of our sales have come through people buying a CD at a show, hell that's how I've bought a lot of mine. You can't really get away selling a CD-R at a show (yes, I've seen ones that are very well-done, but they're still CD-R's, even if they have a nice glossy insert or whatever it is you call the stickers you can put on the CDs themselves, and, I've never seen one sold for more than $4 or $5) for a price that will let you recoup expenses, at least, not if you're going to do it right, and isn't that the whole poitn?

What I'm trying to say is this: you seem to be saying that there's no real barrier to entry, but any hobby, as you call it, that you're serious about, requires, as you say a very real expenditure in the form of time, equipment, and, in this case, studio time and mastering costs. The best band in the world is going to sound like shit if they record in Steve's basement with a cassette-based 8-track recorder. If you want to sound good, and sell records, then you need to spend a big chunk of cash, just like you did with your digital music gear. The real revolution is going to come when I only have to spend somewhere around a grand or two for the gear to set up a viable home studio in which I can record my own band. Audio technology is getting closer, but it's too much of a niche market to really drive down the cost of goods, and to assemble all the correct pieces, I still have to lay a lot of money.

I priced for a thousand CDs because that's generally the minimum number per order you can get pressed (some places, as I mentioned, go down to 500). I had gotten the impression from some of the earlier comments that CDBaby required you to also sell your CDs in their store, which gave me the additionaly mistaken impression that you had to get some made (stupid me for not actually checking), but the fact that you can send in a CD-R doesn't obviate the greater part of my point: producing a quality recording that people will pay for requires a substantial investment, be it studio time (and your equipment), a crapload of digital music gear, or whatever. You can't make a quality record for ultra-cheap. All of that is the barrier to entry, and it's not yet something that can be overcome.

Re:Not what it seems?...

[medeii]

True, initial cost of producing a single CD is high. So is the initial cost of an amateur photographer producing his first photograph, an amateur videographer shooting her first movie, and plenty of other comparable hobbies.

You seem to forget, though, that once that initial expenditure is over, you're done. If you get your own mastering equipment and learn how to do it competently, it will arguably cost you less than having it done professionally for each CD you produce, and your investment will be the cheaper for each song you pass through. The quality may not be as perfect, but unless you haven't bothered to spend the time and money to get decent equipment, I find it hard to believe that you couldn't do a decent job of it yourself.

Last -- it is possible to make quality things cheaply. Read some of Matt Uelmen's comments on Blizzard.com when he was discussing the song Tristram from Diablo II -- it was made with pathetic equipment, yet it still sounds decent even by today's standards.

My point is, essentially, that a lot of the costs you mentioned should either be considered par for the course, and part of simply making the songs to begin with -- or are really not as large as you make them out to be.

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.

Apple + Gap + akamai = ?

[itomato]

Akamai's delivery system

Apple's techno-savvy and style

The Gap peoples' uncanny ability to corral or at least profitize from the natural tendencies of teenagers

A big slap in the face to the traditional recording industry

Could it equal a shake-up severe enough to shift the paradigm?

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:Fantastic!

[happystink]

> (aside: If artists can start to be compensated for their work, what's to stop us IT workers and software developers?)

What? You work for free?

Re:Fantastic!

[TTop]

Umm, a civil rights change? Since when is music distribution a right?

I think calling this a "fundamental civil rights change" is perhaps overstating this a bit.

Re:Fantastic!

[reptilicus]

Remember that Apple has a long history of involvement with creative individuals and companies. Also note that Steve Jobs has a little side company called Pixar, which apparently has done okay in the movie business.

Re:Fantastic!

[Mike Hawk]

Fundamental civil rights change? We should start a collection to buy this man some perspective.

Artists needing to be freed? The record labels don't use threats of violence to get the artists to sign up, only dollar signs. I have no pity for those who signed a contract. They are adults and made that decision for themselves. Its only the artists who become rediculously successful that seek to break them.

What I want to see...

[Squidgee]

What I want to see is an artist they got on the iTMS before I go jumping for joy at this.

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

[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: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.

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. :^)

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: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.

91% of what?

[dkarney]

Is this 91% of the supposed 52% that goes to the label and artist? (40% for label and 12% for artist) Or just the 91% of the 12% cut? This is a difference of either 47 cents or 11 cents per song.

Re:91% of what?

[90XDoubleSide]

You're right, but Apple's cut is thought to be somewhere in the 25-35% range; remember that Apple cut the same contract with everyone: they take the same cut out of indie labels as they do out of RIAA labels, and I think it's safe to say that Apple isn't taking a 78% cut of RIAA sales.

Re:91% of what?

[Dan Crash]

Even if Apple's cut is only 30%, you'll still make more profit using a micropayment provider and selling them yourself. (BitPass charges 15%.)

Plus there's this, from the CDBaby Digital Distribution "How The Money Works" page:

If your CD is not in CD Baby already, our original $35 CD Baby set up still applies. That $35 is for the warehousing and work to have it on cdbaby.com. This $40 is for the additional work for years of digital distribution.

So if you're not already listed with CDBaby, it'll cost you $75 to get listed, not including the investment you had to make in printing your CD in the first place. And if Apple or the other services reject you, you're out $75.

Not that I'm trashing CDBaby or iTunes. It looks like they provide a fair service. But I wonder how necessary they are to successfully selling your music online.

Re:Apple?

[B3ryllium]

It's on apple.slashdot.org, but it's also in the Music and Media categories.

Why is this article on apple.slashdot.org?

[Cy Guy]

CDBaby works with all the major online music services (or claims to) not just iTunes, so shouldn't this run either on the main page or not at all?

Re:Why is this article on apple.slashdot.org?

[LePrince]

Errrr... It IS on the main page. What are you smoking ?

Retaliation from RIAA?

[gumpish]

Seems that if this is really happening that the RIAA and the major labels would pull the music from the artists they "represent" to punish the store...

91% of what?

[Dan Crash]

This seems like great news, but artists won't get 91% of the 99 cents each track. They'll get 91% of whatever iTunes agrees to pay them per track, and we don't know what that is yet.

If Apple decides to give artists a quarter for every song sold (which is more than the 7 cents per track RIAA artists are currently receiving), you'll get 22 cents a track. Many artists might be better off selling their music for 50 cents a song using micropayments and encouraging fans to buy directly from them. More music gets sold to fans, and the artists receive more profit.

But there's definitely an advantage to being listed in iTunes or other major music services, and there's nothing that says you can't do both. It'll be interesting to see how this shakes out.

Yes: By December

[KFury]

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

Re:IF I EVER MEET YOU I WILL KICK YOUR ASS!!!

[Trigun]

I doubt it.

Re:Just Checking

[shotfeel]

That last paragraph describes what I think is the least user-friendly aspect of buymusic.com's model.

Say you purchase 100 songs from them, then want to transfer some songs to your mp3 (wmp?) player. Some will transfer, some won't. How is the user supposed to keep track?

IMO its simply stupid to have several different levels (for lack of a better term) of DRM and saddle the user with the burdon of trying to keep track of which ones they can do what with -short of trying to copy/transer/burn and having it fail.

At least Apple kept it simple.

Re:Just Checking

[JWW]

In the buy.com discussion I vowed not to buy anything from them anymore.

I have yet to buy anything from apple (well recently anyway, I do have an Apple ][e ).

No hypocracy here, I don't use iTunes either. I would very much like both apple and buy.com to support Linux.

Re:Just Checking

[FatRatBastard]

We hate buymusic.com because its DRM is too oppressive, not to mention it's based on sub-par Microsoft technology that's already been cracked.

Huh??? Shouldn't that be a good thing? I mean, if you're going to pluck down dosh for some downloaded music and it has to be DRMed (because the RIAA folks ain't going to allow it any other way) wouldn't you want it cracked all to hell so you can actually burn it / transfer it / etc?

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:CD Albums...

[user32.ExitWindowsEx]

Chances are you can nerf the 2 second gap with your burner software. I know I've seen the option, but it's been so long since I burned an audio CD.

Re:CD Albums...

[Alsee]

the 2 second gap

One idea would be to download a program to glue the songs together into one file. Then you could even do things like crossfade from one into the next.

-

Re:CD Albums...

[frission]

yes, that's a work around, however, now you would have 1 track as opposed to two. Also, they could even come out with their own "DRM" type cd image and their own burner software that would delete the image after it burned (of course you could re-rip the cd, but then that's on you...they covered their ass). :)

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:Why deal with CDBaby ?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, that's not what "the internet was about." The Internet is just a big computer network, and doesn't affect the basic laws of economics. Companies in a free market will always specialize, because it's more efficient to have division of labor than not.

Of course, that's a general rule: middlemen will always be part of a capitalist economy. 9% may be too much to make the service worthwhile for artists, and it may just as well be too little for CDBaby to break even. In either case, market pressures will correct it.

Re:Only a matter of time...

[shotfeel]

Its already kinda almost (not really) happening.

Order a large pizza from Pizza Hut, get a free DVD (my kids just got All Dogs Go to Heaven 2).

Slashdot Records?

[TheSync]

Maybe Slashdot should start its own "record label"? Line up S.P.O.C.K. and such for micropayment downloadable MP3s...

Re:Why deal with CDBaby ?

[Rude Turnip]

In a perfect world you could cut out the middleman, but in the end someone has to deal with iTMS. Apple could do it themselves and hire a bunch of staff to deal with thousands of independent bands (and cut their profits significantly) or let someone else like CDBaby deal with all the bands.

In other words, Apple has separated the A&R and distribution functions you would normally see in a monolithic record label.

A&R: CDBaby & other labels
Distribution: Apple

Re:Why deal with CDBaby ?

[FatRatBastard]

Surely the band could deal with Apple themselves ?

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".

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.

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...

Remember the old MP3.com?

[teamhasnoi]

They were pretty swell until the buyout, then everything went to hell. Artists weren't getting paid, you couldn't link there, had to sign in to listen to anything, took 30 clicks to hear something, limits on length and number of songs, all sorts of crappy rules and regulations, and f*cking Maddona and other Major Label songs started showing up. What was great and innovative is now a barely veiled spamvertiser of carefully hidden independent music, and a promoter of the highest bidder.

All this displaced some great talent, discouraged new artists, and soured the old artists who made the service into what it was.

The question remains: What prevents the same buyout/long downward spiral of CDBaby?

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.

Dude, thats almost flaimebait.

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

However, I would hate to see iTMS turn into a place where there is a bunch of crap music, sort of like MP3.com.

The only crap on MP3.com is the "mainstream" music that the record labels put on there. I have found so many brilliant artists there. I would hate it to become a replacement for mp3.com because then it would nolonger be free.

Re:Dude, thats almost flaimebait.

[jared_hanson]

Sorry if I gave you the wrong impression. I should have clarified my point more.

I too have also downloaded a bunch of music from bands on MP3.com. Some I have liked so much that I have even went to their live shows. Jim's Big Ego is a great one, if you're into checking something out.

However, there is also a lot of stuff on there that I consider to be not very good. Granted, one man's trash is another's treasure, but MP3.com seems kind of littered to me, and I am sure to most people. My usage of it has gone way down because I have found the quality ratio to be too low. I simply don't find bands I enjoy as regularly anymore. I was simply raising this point to share my desire that the same situation not befall iTMS.

Re:Dude, thats almost flaimebait.

[harlows_monkeys]

However, there is also a lot of stuff on there that I consider to be not very good. Granted, one man's trash is another's treasure, but MP3.com seems kind of littered to me, and I am sure to most people

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.

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: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...

$40 helps cut the crap

[KalvinB]

The $40 I would imagine isn't so much intended to be a fee (it's really not much at all) but as a way to deter people who would otherwise submit any crap (or just unpolished material) they can come up with.

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 to rush their album into release.

Ben

Re:$40 helps cut the crap

[mkldev]

What troubles me is that the $40 is in addition to the $35 physical pressed CD distribution contract that you already have to be bound by before you can even start into this digital distribution agreement. But wait... before you can enter into that $35 contract, you have to either do duplication or replication of the CD. Or you could be really cheap and do homemake CD-Rs at a substantial investment in time, then keep the channel full at an even bigger investment in time if people buy it.

Not to mention that I believe I've read that the iTMS requires a barcode for every CD. Unless CDBaby is providing those, that pretty much means that anybody who wants their music distributed through iTMS basically has to submit a professionally duplicated disc (or pay someone who has a set of bar codes to sell them one). In either case, you're probably talking about a significant investment.

If the cost of entry were really $40, it would be a way of deterring people from submitting random crap. However, with it structured in the way it is, I rather suspect that the cost of entry is measured in hundreds of dollars, in which case, the $40 is a fee, regardless of how you want to describe it.

What I'd like to see would be CDBaby doing this without any requirement for physical distribution. This would thus provide a way for the really small labels (the 1 and 2 band labels that are probably too small to get on iTMS) to use it as a way of getting into iTMS, but without the need for them to handle your CD distribution (or for that matter, without the need for any physical CDs at all).

Re:Just Checking

[Trelane, the Squire]

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."

Sometimes it looks to me like that is the point. If I lower the bar so far that the **aa will never go for it, I can claim to be waiting for a better service, but still take the moral high ground over downloading.

On the other hand, if 40 million people didn't like MY product, I would rethink my strategy (as opposed to saying that there is something wrong with 40 million people).

Oh no, Elliot Smith becomes huge after all...

[tjstork]

This is the worst thing imaginable..!!!

Re:Why deal with CDBaby ?

[nullard]

Apple only deals with a set number of labels -- including CD Baby. They refuse to deal with individual artists citing the legal hassle of having thousands of individual contracts vs the simplicity of having one contract per label. There was a story about this here when the iTunes Indie meeting happened.

Re:Why deal with CDBaby ?

[shamino0]

Surely the band could deal with Apple themselves ?

I'm sure they could. But what about other online music stores? According to CDBaby's site, they also distribute to listen.com, emusic.com Rhapsody, and others.

CDBaby also sells physical CDs,. For a one-time $35 charge (and 5 copies of your album), they'll warehouse and sell your album. They charge customers whatever you want to charge for your album, keeping $4 per sale. (One thing the /. article didn't mention is that the $40 charge for distribution to download sites is in addition to the $35 charge for them to sell your physical CD.)

Also CDBaby's 9% is 9% of what they get from the web sites. So if Apple charges 99 cents and keeps 40 cents, the remaining 59 cents goes to CDBaby. They take 9% of that (5.31 cents) and pay you the remaining 53.69 cents. Which is still a far cry better than going through a major label, where the artist will get 12 cents and the label owns the copyright on the song.

Overall, their service looks like a great deal. Combined with the fact that studio equipment isn't nearly as expensive as it once was, any band can now record their own material, burn their own CDs, and sell them on-line without any oppressive contracts and for very little money up-front.

Duhhh...

[poptones]

Isn't the whole fucking point of this "new order" to avoid having to sign bands? What you want is what we've had for decades: a system where musicians who don't meet the marketing meddle of a few sharkskinned gatekeepers get quarrantined off into this "other place" where "the lesser bands go."

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:go to itunes and buy our music!

[mcc]

I still do not grasp this fascination with "itunes."

Itunes allowed me to buy and burn legal mp3s of a Gang Starr album for $10.

Therefore I think it's a pretty cool thing.

Does that sound reasonable?

it would be much cooler to see them doing the online distribution themselves in a format (ie MP3 or OGG) that the truly free world embraces.

Actually, I'm part of a small group selling homemade music manufactured at home, and I can imagine using CDBaby to put up music we made even though we already put up mp3s of significant amounts of the music we sell for free.

Why? Exposure. People are much more likely to find and attempt to experiment with music on a "trusted" music service like iTunes than they are to bother with a link on some random guy's sig on slashdot. I would see that $40 sent to CDbaby as effectively nothing more or less than money spent on advertising. If CDBaby was just putting the mp3s on the CDBaby site themselves, It wouldn't look nearly as attractive, since iTunes Music Store etc has a known user base and CDBaby does not.

Re:Just Checking

[Skynyrd]

Um, no.
I don't like them because they are forcing me to use an MS OS, an MS browser, an MS player, etc...

Just like iTunes at this point (well, except that it's Apple stuff, not MS stuff).

When iToons is avalable for Windows, we'll see what happens. Will they allow alternate OS's? Will they alolow MP3's? Will they allow me to download songs, then somehow transfer them to the MP3 player in my truck?

Re:Just Checking

[Dashing Leech]

> You cannot have a "little" freedom, you either have it or you don't. Huh? Rights and freedoms are rarely absolutes. The right to free speech is restricted in many cases, such as hate speech, or yelling "Fire" in a crowded theatre, or joking about bombs at an airport. The question is whether the restrictions are reasonable or not. In the case of buymusic.com, most would say they're too restrictive. In the case of iTMS, many seem to think they're reasonable. Apparently, you think they are still to restrictive, and you are certainly entitled to your opinion.

Dude, get a clue

[poptones]

Who the fuck do you think owns MP3.com?

MP3.com had a lot of promise. Then feearless leader decided they needed to offer Madonna because their own bands weren't going to make him rich, and thus began the beginning of the end.

MP3.com hasn't been "free" since even before the lawsuits... in fact, that's why they were sued.

Re:Why deal with CDBaby ?

[Skynyrd]

Sure. If you're U2, Modonna or Elvis.
I'd bet that even bands that large don't deal with Apple - Apple deals with *record lables*, not bands.

Re:Whats to stop people

[Capt_Troy]

There's nothing to stop you except for your own morals and ethics. As far as they go, I can't begin to explain that to you.

There will always be people who steal (people steal beer all the time). Beer companies and stores don't make money off the people who steal beer. They make money off the people who are of high enough ethical quality to pay for their beer. It's other peoples job to take care of the people who steal beer.

So the question isn't about what apple can do to stop you from stealing music at all. They can't and shouldn't do anything. That's up to you or law enforcement.

Re:Just Checking

[sahala]

Hence, we like Apple for getting the job done with the least invasive DRM possible. It is a lesser of two evils situation.

Except that the original poster was alluding to how DRM is such a black and white issue (in general) on Slashdot. And given the frequency of absolute phrases like Good Thing(tm) and Bad Thing(tm) I honestly don't blame him.

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:Audible.com

[90XDoubleSide]

If someone did the same thing with Music I would be happy. You mean like iTunes? 'cause that's what they based their DRM system on (notice how they added Audible support to iTunes a few months before the store started up). The iTunes policy is virtually identical: three computers and unlimited burning/MP3 players.

Re:Just Checking

[Jucius Maximus]

"We hate buymusic.com, because it uses evil DRM, is that right? I want to make sure. Cause it seems like itunes.com uses DRM also. I guess it's okay though because that is an Apple thing."

The buymusic DRM is too strong. It uses encrypted windows media 9. Good luck sharing with a few other machines, burning to CD, etc.

The apple DRM is just about right. You can burn the music to a CD in normal standard CD Audio and after that, you have a 100% lossless conversion to a DRM-free format, assuming that you consider the original AAC file to be a 'perfect' copy to begin with.

Hypocrisy has nothing to do with it.

Re:Just Checking

[Lomeister]

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.

Don't get me wrong. I'm a a huge Apple fan, but the information you give is not quite accurate. It varies by song.

If you look at the restrictions on the current number one BuyMusic download (Justin Timberlake's 'Rock Your Body' - need to be on Windows with IE), you'll see that the usage rules are: Downloads - 3, Transfers - unlimited, Burns - 10

It's 91% of 65%

[no_opinion]

No one has mentioned the fact that Apple keeps a piece of the sale. I think they keep 35%. If correct, this means that the artist gets 58 cents for every 99 cent sale. This means you need to sell about 68 singles to recoup your $40. Still, not bad.

Re:Only a matter of time...

[waffle zero]

I can see the day when companies like McDonald's or Taco Bell start their own music labels.

CocaCola already is doing something like this. They run silly CokeFMads on radio stations to get airplay (albiet short) for some artists. I don't see where the motive comes from, but someone has to be profiting.

And I just googled "pepsi music" and wouldn't you know it?

Welcome to 2003. We've been expecting you.

[Doktor Memory]

Trust me, if you're anywhere in the indy music scene, you've heard of CDbaby. They are pretty much exactly what they claim to be: the ideal distribution medium for indy bands.

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:It's actually $75

[kallisti]

I'm not sure what you mean by 8ai and 8aiii, but the synposis at the beginning says:

so we have to be the exclusive distributor of your digital music to these services (only) during the contract

that doesn't prevent you from doing anything else with your music! only the delivery to the music services like iTunes and Rhapsody.

you can stop at any time - with 30 days' notice. we don't want to restrict you from anything.

That seems pretty clear-cut to me. I don't see anything about three and a half years anywhere. Explicitly, yes, you can put the music on your own web page.

I see fanbois

[poptones]

DRM is DRM. Your argument has no logical consistency, only excuses.

Re:I see fanbois

[Alsee]

I don't have a Mac, but as I understand it Apple's DRM is little more than a pretence. You can save it to CD and rip it as MP3. It's a nuciance that they make you jup through hoops, but it is different in that they aren't trying to make fair use impossible.

-

You are good to go

[bustacap]

Then there is not much of an issue here. You can send CD Baby 5 CDs and you are good to go!

Look at Amazon

[f97tosc]

Maybe a moderation system is in order?

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

[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)...

Re:Look at Amazon

[Ageless Stranger]

They also have a patent on one click, and Apple has uses that in iTunes and in their online store. Jobs and Bezos are tight, so I'm sure Apple will just licence this too.

Re:Look at Amazon

[ChuyMatt]

as they have licensed one click from amazon...

Er, no.

[Doktor Memory]

Well, yes and no. At the low end, any non-famous band cutting their own CDs is something of a novelty exercise and are not likely to make any actual money off the matter.

But: the way that bands actually get famous is for people -- lots of people, in places other than just the band's home city -- to hear their music. MP3 distribution can only get you so far; ideally you really want college radio DJs playing your stuff, and telling their listeners where to get it. For that, you need CDs. Pressing and distributing your own CDs is an incredible waste of time and money; cdbaby very cleverly automates the process and makes it quite affordable.

And: while basically nobody buys novelty-press books (unless the author is a multimillionaire self-promoting blowhard), lots of people buy indy-band music. Enough to make a living on? Probably not. Enough to buy the occasional new instrument? Hell yes.

Good idea

[August_zero]

While I have no doubt in my cynical little heart, that this noble idea will become twisted and exploitative to the artists eventually (just as long ago the record companies served a good purpose for musicians) This is exactly what artists need to do, not just indie artists, Big artists especially.

If artists stop renewing contracts with major labels and begin to embrace the direct sale model, they will make crap tons of money more than they do with their current contracts. They already have the notoriety that they need to move product, and if enough big names go this route, the RIAA will quickly find itself without any clients.

I personally would happily give my business to an establishment such as this.

Don't get your hopes up.

[geekee]

"Imagine being a touring indie band and be able to tell people to go to iTunes and buy your songs;"

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.

Because CdBaby isn't run by greedy fools?

[poptones]

MP3.com became what it is because they decided to start offering the "music locker" service, which essentially allowed them to co-opt any work by any major label - which, of course, led to them being sued and then owned by the very players they had portended to usurp.

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:Just Checking

[peter_gzowski]

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.

I know that it's not the Big 5, but Emusic serves up (almost) all you can eat downloads (LAME-encoded, VBR, 192kb/s average, no-DRM mp3s), for $10 or $15 (depends only on whether you want it for 12 months or 3). The "(almost)" is because I've heard they'll cap you at 2000 tracks. Still, $15/2000 tracks = $0.0075/track. I never hit the cap, though.

Dude, Where's my car?

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Note: The subject has nothing to do with the post. I just happen to like the movie.
Who the fuck do you think owns MP3.com?
Yeah, I know its owned by the record industry. You got here right in time Captain.
MP3.com hasn't been "free" since even before the lawsuits... in fact, that's why they were sued.
I guess I don't know what you mean by free. They were sued over their myMp3 service that let people rip copyrighted cds and store the mp3's on their servers. And allowed you or anyone with your username and password to stream them from anywhere. The music availiable for download was always free and had the permission of the copyright owners.

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.

Where are my mod points when I need them!

[macmurph]

Mod parent up!

Epitonic.com

[mccalli]

Epitonic. I bought a Lemongrass CD from there - a band I'd never heard of before. Found them via their 'Radio' idea - you stream a playlist (MP3, unrestricted...) of artists that are related in musical style, then see if you like anything.

No commercial relationship, just a happy customer etc.

Cheers,
Ian

Re:Just Checking

[TwoStep]

Reading is fundamental.

Depending upon the particular song

Twostep

Garage Bands of the world unite!

[Iowaguy]

.... The size of the garage just got a whole lot bigger. :)

um...

[Doktor Memory]

Considering that CDBaby only started this service today, I'm guessing that the answer is "not many."

Remnants of Apple Records...

[NaugaHunter]

For one, Apple *will not* deal with the band themselves. Read anything put out by them and they make that explicitly clear.

It just occurred to me - they may have worded their last settlement with Apple Records so explicitly that representing music acts directly is the one thing they can't do, given that that is exactly what Apple Records does do.

Just a random thought. As a settlement, the details are not public. (I couldn't find them.) However, I seem to recall Paul McCartney forcing InterVideo(I think) to work with Apple Computer so his DVD would play on the computer he uses. If he still has influence with Apple Records, and isn't threatened by Apple, he may be holding them back. So called 'experts' keep bringing them up; surely if they had a legally actionable position they would have made it by now.

Who's tossing the bone to whom?

[chundo]

Kudos to Apple for their "light" DRM. But I think instead of them throwing the RIAA a bone, it may have been the other way around. The RIAA is supremely unpopular with digital music buffs. What better way to win some back than by allowing iTMS to use minimal DRM? They are limiting their exposure, and consequently their risk, because only 5% of computer users can access the store.

The truly telling moment will be when Apple launches their Windows-compatible iTMS. I have a strong hunch that right now RIAA views iTMS as a boutique shop that gives them positive publicity with minimal risk. I expect a return to more draconian terms for mass-market (read: Windows) music sales. Perhaps this is the real reason that iTMS is taking so long to release on Windows.

-j

Re:Who's tossing the bone to whom?

[chundo]

A couple of groups you missed. Four: musicians who don't want to get screwed. Five: people who want to listen to high-quality digital music in their home, car, office, portable player or anywhere else they choose; i.e., digital music buffs, as I stated.

iTMS was launched earlier this year. December is a year off. That's a long time. Please, point out to me the part of my original post that said "Apple originally intended to release it at the same time as Mac iTMS". My point was that the later release date may have had more to do with legal issues than choice. These legal/contractual issues can take a long time to sort out, which you would know if you've ever released a product requiring outside licensing. This negotation time may simply have been planned into the Windows release cycle - Apple's not stupid.

Educate yourself and drop the AC before your next flame.

-j

Not just itunes

[eadint]

This is not just itunes. and i cant see why apple wouldnt sell it, they may not put it on the page and you may have to search for it. maybe even a bilboard or ranking system in another area. to help with selection, but guess what dipwads, hd space is cheap, they can have every crappy band in the world on itunes and it wouldnt eaven dent their capacity. as far as distribution. why not take your music to the radio station, if they like it they may play it dipwad. if not you can bitch about the machine all you want, you still suck.

Re:Just Checking

[squisher]

I totally agree... what good are all the news about "great iTunes" if they make the program as OS centric as M$ makes the WindowsMedia stuff??
As nice as Apple stuff can be, first they need to get rid of using the same techniques (-> Keeping everything on their OS) as Microsoft does, then I'll start to like them. Before that, nope.

Bye,
Squisher

Re:Just Checking

[Lomeister]

The key part is that Downloads here is 3. Not the "ONE song" the original poster stated.

Re:Just Checking

[ichimunki]

Sigh. I've been moderated flamebait for my perfectly legitimate argument that DRM cannot possibly be "reasonable" because DRM is just machine logic and is entirely not "able" to "reason" (the very premise of the word reasonable). And AFAICT iTunes' DRM is so flimsy that all you do to circumvent is mix-burn-rip rather than rip-mix-burn. If the MS DRM is lame because it's been cracked, what does that say for DRM that's broken from the get go?

Wait a second...

[Tom7]

What the hell does CD Baby "distribute?"

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.

Re:Wait a second...

[TheAwfulTruth]

Did you miss out on the part where the artist keeps 91%?

That is the highest percentage of money going to an artist, indy or no in history!

Only $40 an album to host and + 91% sales return is by far the best music deal anyone could expect out there. Places like Ampcast take 50%!

As in indy artist myself and having been around and around the OMD scene, I can say with some authority that CD Baby is one of the best deals for artists out there.

Re:Wait a second...

[Tom7]

It's 91% of whatever percent apple gives them. Someone says that comes out to about 60%, which is only a smidgeon better than the "industry standard" 50/50 for a good indie label. And that's a ripoff considering that they aren't actually doing anything.

It is so sad to see people sucked into the success=sales dream, when they could be making music just for fun and for the sake of art.

Re:Wait a second...

[dbrutus]

A smidgen better = better

You seem to be complaining that a good deal isn't a fantastic deal. Well, what's better?

Re:Wait a second...

[Tom7]

Yes, but compared to what a good indie label does for its artist (produce the album, press CDs and secure distributing deals, advertise, ...) and what the purchaser receives for about the same amount (an actual high-quality CD with artwork) we're looking at a significantly better deal for CD Baby and Apple and a worse deal for the consumer.

Better, in my opinion, is realizing that the internet gives budding artists the way to realize their dream of being heard without having to succumb to industry metrics of success like CD sales and radio play, and now, 60 cents a song. The vast majority of bands will never make any money at all, AND nobody will download their music, AND CD Baby will get $40 apiece. Better is to put their music online for free (it costs almost nothing to do; there are even some free music sites like IUMA that will host it for you), and make music for fun.

Re:Wait a second...

[terroristy]

Apple had a meeting with a bunch of smaller lables and told them that they were (initially) only extending the ability to distribute through iTMS to 40 or so companies. CDBaby can charge you because there is no direct way to get your music to iTMS without going through *one* of those 40. Limited access means the ability to charge for it even if they don't really do anything.

But yes as you point out they give you no marketing or advertising for your $40 + 9% just access.

Re:Wait a second...

[dbrutus]

You can put your music online for fun on your own ISP account. There's nothing stopping people from parking their music anywhere on the NET. This isn't for that sort of musician.

Let me give you an example, I can see (especially after iTMS goes to Windows) a lot of religious music and ethnic music getting put on iTMS especially stuff from the former Soviet bloc. These countries have a significant diaspora and a lot of it isn't in the traditional immigrant landing places anymore. The diaspora has lots of money but they aren't concentrated and iTMS gives these sorts of artists a way to reach out to that dispersed audience. I can see Divertis making better money selling over the net than they do internationally touring.

Not quite

[SeanAhern]

DRM and such aside, iTunes Store has pretty much the opposite business model from the one you're enjoying. The biggest difference is that the iTunes Store doesn't have a monthy fee. It's done on a track-by-track basis. This business model caters more to impulse buyers, a completely different set of people than those who are willing to pay a monthy fee.

Not to pan your service. Just saying that it's a different animal than the iTunes Store.

Re:Just Checking

[CaptainStormfield]

Emusic serves up (almost) all you can eat downloads (LAME-encoded, VBR, 192kb/s average

I am delighted to learn that eMusic is now offering VBR tracks! I was a subscriber for (quite) a while, but ultimately dropped the service b/c of the low quality of the 128kb/s tracks. Lots of great, obscure, blues tracks.

Re:Why deal with CDBaby ?

[pyros]

Apple won't deal with individual artists, labels only, according to the leaked notes from Apple's meeting with some Indie labels.

Nice feature, but not exactly new.

[BorgCopyeditor]

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 [...]

You may not be able to get it by going to The Wall or Sam Goody, and you definitely won't be able to get it if you buy CDs at Wal-Mart or a truck stop, but you almost certainly will get it if you go into one of the nation's many fine independent music stores. I grew up near such a store. The guys who ran it were nerds and they could be jerks sometimes, but they did know a lot about a lot of different kinds of music. They were usually very happy to give you (for free) off-the-cuff dissertations on any particular artist/producer/genre you asked about.

There is no substitute for knowledge.

Burn Cds

[poptones]

you can burn CDs with most of the services. You can even burn CDs from the Real networks craptastic site. You can then burn'em to MP3 or anything else you like. Hell, I've even used my capture card to rip Real video streams to videotape and back, or even just cap my desktop playing a clip and then burn it back to avi in veedub. Whoopee.

Holes - analog or otherwise - are not unique to itunes. All that is unique about itunes is the religious zeal behind the corporate parent.

Re:Burn Cds

[MoneyT]

There are still differences. Real's service is pay per burn ( and people don't like that) and Buy's service changes how many times you can burn on each individual song (and people don't like that). Apple is a one time cost, with unlimited burns FOR EVERY SONG. Untill somone comes up with something better, Apple's service is going to be the favorite.

Dude, where's my penis?

[poptones]

The trouble came because MP3.com was distributing music to which they did not hold the copyright. The trouble came because they sold out their own artists in an attempt to piggyback on the success of the old school publishers.

How about if I opened up an "online library" where I let anyone who could type in an ISBN number have access to the complete book?

There are so many holes in that system as to be completely obvious it is nothing but a feeble attempt at circumventing copyright. Ordinarily I really don't give a shit, and even support many such efforts - but in the case of MP3.COM I hold my nose in disgust, because its entire failure was due to their management betraying everything they purported to believe and (more importantly) betraying thousands of musicians who had aligned themselves with that message.

Re:Just Checking

[geekwagon]

Yes, you can download it onto 3 computers in that case. However, there are certain things that only the "original" downloading computer can do that the other 2 downloads cannot do, such as burning CDs and transferring to MP3 players. I believe that is what he was saying by being limited to a single computer.

Heh, off topic but...

[TheAwfulTruth]

One reason I like doing my own disks is because I can choose the disk to use. I like the solid black ones for my dark music. And just today I just found some CDR's that on top look exactly like a 45 record singles. Course those CDs cost a little more, but when doing it yourself, you save so inthe end it works out to the same cost.

whoopty-doo, digital distribution!

[GI Jones]

Sometimes I wonder about you all... when it comes to becoming a famous musician, it's not a matter of distribution, but creating a demand for distribution. There are tons of digital warehouses out there for indie artists.. just waiting to house their music for distribution, but unless people know (or want) to go there, there isn't much reason for having it housed anywhere digitally.

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.

Re:whoopty-doo, digital distribution!

[MasonMcD]

ClearChannel is a whole different can of worms, but if you're arguing that getting Letterman spots and radio time is what being a famous musician is about, maybe it *is* time for a paradigm shift to pure online, search engines, smaller club gigs, and word of mouth.

Re:Just Checking

[Alsee]

uncompressed

I really doubt many people want uncompressed music, it's something like a half gig for a CD. But if people want uncompressed then offer that option for a few cents more to cover the bandwidth. There's no reason not to offer a variety of formats from 64kbs all the way up to uncompressed. Offer the customer whatever they want to buy.

you can "hate DRM" all you want, but someone had to toss a bone to the RIAA for some music to get sold

Nonsense. No one has to throw the RIAA anything just because they have chosen to commit suicide by refusing to sell a product.

The RIAA is terrified on un-crippled music. But refusing to sell un-crippled music is pointless - it does not prevent uncrippled music from existing. The fact is that it exists, and people WILL get it in that format one way or another. Basic capitalism, sell people the product they want. And no one wants a crippled product.

If you're holding out for the totally unrestricted, uncompressed downloads for $0.04 per song

I'm not suggesting $0.04, but their current prices are wildly inflated. The fact is that the RIAA could have had a highly profitable online business if they had started selling their full catalog of unencrypted music online at reasonable prices years ago when they were hit over the head with the fact that it was possible and there was a demand for it.

Current offerings are very limited in selection, the products are crippled, they are way overpriced, and they are struggling against the huge P2P phenomenon that exploded exactly because they refused to serve the online market. To a large extent they created the situation by refusing to serve the market. A "black market" sprung up to fill that vacuum. And in spite of all of those handicaps, their current services still get thousands of customers. If they had done it right they would have had millions of customers. Setting up online sales has a signifigant up-front fixed costs, but the cost per download is near zero. With hundreds or thousands of times as many customers they'd get far larger profits even if the individual price is lower.

-

Screw indie music...

[gnovos]

Top 40 groups should jump on this badwagon. Why settle for a measly 2% when they can have 91%?

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)

Re:I was partially wrong

[kallisti]

Oddly enough, IANAL...

Digital Master is defined as "copies of RIGHTS HOLDER Content in digital form, which CD BABY may sell or authorize Distributors to sell". The exclusive right given to CDBaby is to reproduce and convert into Digital Masters. The key thing here is that Digital Masters are copies to be sold. A copy which is not to be sold is not a Digital master and thus not part of the agreement. It does imply you cannot sell your stuff on your own webpage, which is reasonable (why would you?). They make it clear that you remain RIGHTS HOLDER.

Re:I was partially wrong

[mcc]

AAaaahh...

Interesting.. that makes things much clearer. ,thank you.

Re:Just Checking

[feldsteins]

I really doubt many people want uncompressed music

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 basically sell totally unrestricted digital music in the midst of the entire p2p phenomenon strains credulity to the breaking point. It just ain't gonna happen. Ever.

I'm not suggesting $0.04, but their current prices are wildly inflated.

Compared to what? The CD at Best Buy? Napster in its heyday? I don't think it's bargain-basement by any means, but the Bjork CD I bought for $9.95 beat the hell out of Best Buy ($17.99) and even the low price juggernaut Walmart ($14.99). I think given the fact that I have to provide my own CD-R balances it out nicely.

they are struggling against the huge P2P phenomenon that exploded exactly because they refused to serve the online market

First sensible thing you've said. I couldn't agree more. But life goes on. What happens now? We wait a decade or two until the entire recording industry crumbles and is reborn from its own ashes? Meanwhile we all suck tunes down from each other on the latest p2p network? Count me out. I'm suggesting that the RIAA took a timid step in the right direction, thanks to the mesmerizing salesmanship of one Mr. Steve Jobs. They started offering digital download sales with terms that people by and large would not find too onerous. That deserves to be supported.

Re:YOU FAIL IT!

[Knife_Edge]

Hi, it has come to my attention that posts that have the same subject line as common trolls will be moderated into the ground, sometimes using the 'offtopic' moderation, even when they are entirely on topic, and relevant to the discussion at hand. That's life, I guess.

Mod away, morons, my karma bonus is not going to go away.

Re:Just Checking

[jonwil]

Why not introduce watermarking of music sold via online means or otherwise. Basicly, anytime you buy music, something that could be traced back to you would be embedded in the download by the software on the music site. Then, if you copy that, the RIAA can check for watermarks and find out who origonaly copied that file and therefor who to sue for all they have.

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!

GarageBand.com! (and iTMS Radio!)

[Slur]

GarageBand.com has had a contest every month since their inception which is based on a user-moderated scoring system. It's been honed for a good long time and it's really well-refined at this point.

On another note... I think it would be excellent if iTunes Music Store had a streaming radio station that played random songs continuously. Not all songs would be played - just those that are specifically cleared for play - and perhaps not all whole songs. (Of course constant 30-second snippets would quickly become annoying.) The majority of people who make music in their basement would gladly authorize iTMS to play their songs.

If you heard a song you liked on the iTMS radio you could go back to the recent playlist, locate the song, and purchase it for $.99 - Bam!

But does the promotion matter

[SuperKendall]

If you don't make any money? Even moderatley sucessful bands would seem to be much better off going the iTunes route.

I'll bet underground promotion done by the bands point to iTunes would be way more successful.

I can even see another industry springing up, one of pure music promotion and none of the other nonsense that goes on in the music world right now.

Re:But does the promotion matter

[Johnny Mnemonic]

Imagine the bullshit that could've been avoided if this was out when grunge was getting big. Check that: imagine the bullshit that will be avoided for the next fan inspired music revolution that happens. Hopefully Apple lets more in than not--and the way I read all the press, it sounded like anything with any one of the "invited" labels was in, but maybe I was being too optimistic.

btw--I don't really care what you think about "the grunge music scene". That ain't the point.

Moderation system RELATED, but different point

[ToadMan8]

This is related to the moderation system, but simply posting anything on I-Tunes now seems worth it... There are enough people that would download your songs based on some intreguing snippits (ultra repative FruityLoops techno, for example) that it would make your 40 $$ investment worth it.

If it's so cheep and so much profit goes to the artist I wonder if big artists will break off from record companies to do this only. Think about it - if The Offspring's new CD is only avalible from I-Tunes a ton of people (maybe a quarter who would normally buy the CD) would get it from I-Tunes and that still is like 3 times the proffit they'd get had they gone the normal cd route and sold 4 times the discs.... It's an interesting possiblity.

I've bought from them before - they are great!!!

[SuperKendall]

They have really super responsive customer service, and shipped very quickly. The site may look a bit plain, but look beyond the lack of Photoshop skills and you will find a lot of great music - plus they have a really nice means of finding new music by various categories that is hand-picked.

For anyone that likes soundtrack kind of music, take a look at The Haight Gang, a soundtrack without a movie but very well done and with a lot of great musical flavors woven in.

As for Apple's part...

[SuperKendall]

They are hosting the music, hosting free previews, and spending a lot of R&D on building the best music purchasing software on the planet - not to mention advertising the heck out of the store and maintaining a staff that week through drek to come up with music recommendations. CD-Baby does not seem to be doing much, but then they are not taking a lot either. And they are also putting your CD up for sale on THIER site as well, which is a nice complement to the ITMS.

If it's so easy, go build yourself an ITMS and charge less!

Re:As for Apple's part...

[Tom7]

It's true that Apple does stuff, but to throw on an extra album or extra hundred albums can't really be that expensive. Most of the things you mention are independent of how much music they host (and advertising gets easier when they have more albums ;)).

> If it's so easy, go build yourself an ITMS and charge less!

Actually, I just distribute all my music on the internet for free.

Is 99c too much for a song? No.

[SuperKendall]

As far as I'm concerned, any song taking up space on my HD of physical space in a CD rack is WELL worth 99 cents. That is a very reasonable price for literally years of enjoyment I expect to get out of a song I like. Cheaper is nice of course, but I do not begrudge Apple or the artist the money they make from 99 cents.

Re:Just Checking

[Alsee]

suggest that they should basically sell totally unrestricted digital music in the midst of the entire p2p phenomenon strains credulity to the breaking point. It just ain't gonna happen. Ever.

Is there really any reason for them not to? The songs are available on P2P uncrippled. Refusing to sell uncrippled songs does nothing to hinder that. The only effect it has is that it chases away customers. And those customers have no where else to turn except to P2P. By selling a proper product they can start drawing customers away from P2P.

The real problem is that the recording industry has an oppressive cartel. If there were real competition look at what would happen if one of them did sell uncrippled files - they would capture the entire download market. No one would ever buy a crippled file over a non-crippled file. If one did it they's all have to follow suit or die. That is the great thing about capitalism and a free market - it forces companies to do their best to provides exactly what the customer wants. The RIAA is a cartel restraining exactly those free market forces. To make it even worse the MPAA, RIAA, and broadcasters are floating legislation to exempt them from anti-trust liability when they collude to create and enforce DRM systems. People don't want criplled products and they can on force them on consumers through oppressive legislation and/or through illegal anti-tust / monopoly tactics.

-

Re:Just Checking

[feldsteins]

Is there really any reason for them not to?...By selling a proper product they can start drawing customers away from P2P.

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 competition look at what would happen if one of them did sell uncrippled files - they would capture the entire download market

You'd better pick up the phone and call the RIAA immediately. They'll be shocked and amazed at your astute analysis and immediately change all their business plans. Surely you realize that if this were really a viable way to go one of the big lables would have done it hoping to get the jump on the others. No, they all realize it's much more complicated than that. There's the nagging fact that - given the popularity of p2p networks - your legally sold content would be redistributed at about a 100% rate, every legal download being cloned hundreds, perhaps thousands of times. Again, why take this approach when they can nab virtually the same number of legit customers by offering a slightly restricted file and seeing the redistribution rate cut in half? The downside is?

even worse the MPAA, RIAA, and broadcasters are floating legislation...

Yep, they're evil. No argument. What they're doing in our capital right now is reprehensible. I myself have written several scathing emails to my elected officials about the matter. But that doens't make it any more likely - or sensible! - for them to start selling unrestricted downloads next week. I reiterate - it ain't gonna happen. Largely because they won't need to.

Re:Please

[dbrutus]

CDBaby charges $40 for somebody to take your music and encode it and then upload it which is going to take at least an hour. That's a reasonable charge for encoding an album.

Apple pays bandwidth charges to Akamai and get charged on Mbps actually served. It's probably going to be a fraction of a penny per sale.

whoops.. should have double previewed...

[Reece400]

sorry.. better urls.. no idea where those spaces came from :S...

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fmic rosoft.com%2F&charset=iso-8859-1+%28Western+Europe %29&doctype=HTML+4.01+Transitional

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww .oogle.com%2F&charset=iso-8859-1+%28Western+Europe %29&doctype=HTML+4.01+Transitional

Reece,

Bring back AudioGalaxy

[sorbits]

AudioGalaxy didn't have a moderation system, but for each artist there was an easy to use message board, so just go to your favourite artist and see what other people recommend (and read why, if you don't care why, there was of course also the correlation system also found at Amazon).

I never bought as much music as in the days of AudioGalaxy, even though I had to "import" it from various different countries, since much of it was not available in the mainstream music stores.

Re:Just Checking

[dbrutus]

The Soviets made all sorts of rules in the Gulag so that no matter what you did, your day went well only because of the benevolence of the camp guards. Solzhenitsyn wrote about a guard who bet a zek a favor that, from his guard tower, he could name 20 rule violations the zek was guilty of right then. The zek lost.

When MS doesn't check student ID in order to up sales and then cries crocodile tears as they complain loudly to Congress about pirated sales it's a similar deal. It matters if you can do reasonable things with music you bought legally and not just technologically. Free men don't live by technical savvy outwitting slow, dumb oppressors, they just live their lives without interference by right.

Sounds like...

[The1Genius]

So, if anyone can submit a cd to to be sold song by song on iTunes, listen.com, etc... Then this is starting to sound like it's going to be cutting into MP3.COM's business model!

Re:Just Checking

[Alsee]

why take this approach when they can nab virtually the same number of legit customers by offering a slightly restricted file

I think we're talking about more than a slight drop in customers. Of course "reasonable DRM" isn't as bad as "draconian DRM", but no matter what the restrictions are sooner or later they are going to be a nuciance to perfectly legitimate use. The RIAA is just shooting themselves in the foot with an inferior product.

and seeing the redistribution rate cut in half

Lets say they cut the number of times the download gets put on P2P by not just half, but by ten thousand. You wind up with the exact same P2P distribution of the file. If an uncrippled file makes it onto P2P even once it will multiply to exactly the same extent as if it was put on there ten thousand times.

The downside of using DRM is very real, while most of the supposed upside vanishes the first time the song "escapes" from DRM.

You can compete with free, but it's just dumb to sell an inferior product. Especially while trying to compete with free.

-

Have you looked at iTMS lately?

[SPYvSPY]

Every time I log into iTMS, I want to like it, but the majority of what I see are crappy records by artists that have been irrelevant for the past twenty years. I mean, sure, they have a few new Top-40 artists and Clear Channel-wh0re artists, but they are also pushing junk like Grace Jones and Marc Anthony way too hard.

Re:problem downloading mp3s on mac

[TheInternet]

what is the deal with you Mac fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Mac (a 8600/300 w/64 Megs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to download 300 Megs of MP3s from Limewire to my computer. 40 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Mac, the same operation would take about 2 minutes.

The machine you're using has almost nothing in common with the current hardware and software architecture. The machine you have came out before the first iMac, and is slower than it (even though first iMac ran at 233Mhz). But realistically, the problem you're having has little or nothing to do with the CPU speed.

Most importantly, you are not running Mac OS X on your 8600 there. You're running an OS (Mac OS 8/9) with an outdated design and a non-ideal networking layer. There's no preemptive threading either, thus the Netscape problem. If you are somehow running Mac OS X, you're running it on a machine it wasn't designed/optimized for. Now, on top of that, LimeWire is a Java app, right? Well, Java sucks on any Mac OS before X. Mac OS 7/8/9 were never designed to do things like that. Compare that to NT which I believe has a reasonably good network layer and good Java support. Even on the chip with a slower clock, the NT machine will simply do LimeWire transfers faster than Mac OS 8/9.

So basically, you're using a machine that came out before Apple got its shit back together (before Steve Jobs came back). Reserve judgement until you try some sort of G4 running Mac OS X. The combination of the two represents a completely different computer than what you're using, and results in a radically different experience.

No one on slashdot is raving about Mac OS 9 on an 8600. Heck, not even that many Mac users do.

- Scott

yeah but check this out....

[commodoresloat]

validate slashdot, if you can. A great solution to the problem; screw making your code valid; just block requests from the validator in robots.txt!

Re:Great idea! - but don't forget to master

[zpok]

Absolutely right, dirt cheap distribution, but the cost of having your music mastered professionally doesn't go away.

Respect for my ears and installation, master that sh*t!
If you think your music is good, it's worth it.

tw I don't think Apple is going to *want* to sell badly mastered stuff, and it's pretty clear from the musicbaby website that they (Apple) have the final say in this.

Cheers

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!

Isn't This the Same Old Story?

[DannyO152]

Show business is lousy with folks who will "represent" a "client" for a fee. Really folks. How much forbearance do you think Apple or any other digital download store will have for a distributor who offers music with the solitary merit that the check cleared.

SAE

[theolein]

I did a diploma in multimedia production through Tom Misner's SAE schools. In this case in Switzerland. The schools definitely do have a fairly good level of education and since their main focus is audio engineering, your CD stand's a good chance of being heard by budding producers/DJ's/sound techies. His system is really one of the better and fairer ones, my only gripe being that the schools tend to be a bit like the McDonalds of audio engineering.

This is cool

[AvitarX]

for $40 dollors a touring band could be like, get a tape of this concert in x number of days at blah.

they could sell high quality recordings and own the bootleg market of there stuff. Only need 10 people a concert to be interested enpough to make your money back.