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

[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

[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

[darkov]

Maybe a moderation system is in order?

I can see my tracks getting modded -1, Troll

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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[darkov]

Where you get depreciation at all is beyond me

Well, you have to factor the cost of your equipment into your expenses. Computers are considered to have a useful life of 3 years (in general, in Australia for tax purposes, probably in corporate America), so you have to add 33% of the cost of your equipment to the expense of delivering the service each year. It's accounting and it's a mysterious thing, I agree.

Also, I notice that you've pulled the number 15% out of the thin air.

Indeed. But this whole discussion is based on thin air figures if we're talking about how Apple would actually cost it.

The more general point I'm trying to make is that corporate costings are way different to what most people would consider reasonable and it's mostly due to accounting, which is the result of many things that most people don't think of.

A little story: I used to work for an investment bank. They had a tricky database optimisation problem and no time or budget to get a programmer (me) to do it. It was a 12 Gig database, so I said: buy another 12 Gig of memory and plop it in the server, allocate it as cache and your database will rush (reporting database, practically no updates). They told me it was impossible because the memory would cost $AUD30K (about $USD15K) a year! (This was only a couple of years ago) Why? Becuase the IT department factored in the cost of "support" for all hardware they sold. Go figure.

Re:Great for highschool bands

[stonecypher]

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

Well, you have to factor the cost of your equipment into your expenses. Computers are considered to have a useful life of 3 years (in general, in Australia for tax purposes, probably in corporate America), so you have to add 33% of the cost of your equipment to the expense of delivering the service each year. It's accounting and it's a mysterious thing, I agree.

Hm. That's an interesting take. For the purposes of finding a way to squeeze money out of taxes, that's probably great. But if they're being sensible and using drives with a high MTBF, then their estimated life span seems less important than their actual life span. Granted, I've never run a service like this, but I'm willing to wager that an average whole-drive turnover of 5.5 years or more isn't unreasonable. Either way, it seems quite likely to compare very favorably to the cost of commercials.

The more general point I'm trying to make is that corporate costings are way different to what most people would consider reasonable and it's mostly due to accounting, which is the result of many things that most people don't think of.

There's certainly something to this. However, the better a job we do of nailing down those actual numbers, the better job we can do of comparing those numbers to numbers we made up about other industries. ;)

because the memory would cost $AUD30K (about $USD15K) a year!

Now that you've presented it that way, that gives me a very different take on costs. That said, I stand by my argument, because I'm comparing it to another cost which has an ongoing nature: advertising.

Remember, if it were a service issue, I'd be with you: too expensive and a bother. But I really think that they'll do it on the advertising basis alone. I mean, think about the discounts that malls give to big "destination" stores, because they drive up the visit rates to the other stores in the mall, allowing those smaller stores to pay the otherwise exorbitant rent.

And besides, I want them to host my friend's band, so maybe a viral meme started here will eventually get back to them.

Re:Great for highschool bands

[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

[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.

Methinks...

[Spazntwich]

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

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

[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

[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

[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

[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...

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

[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.

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.

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!

[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!

[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!

[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".

-

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...

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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.

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: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: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

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...

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!

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?...

[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?...

[GrapesForBuddha]

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

In addition to the $40 iTunes setup fee (per album), you have to pay them a $35 setup fee (I forget whether that is per album or not).

So if you didn't "really" have a CD but you want to sell the contents on iTunes and CD Baby, you can burn a few copies yourself and slap a label on it.

Re:Not what it seems?...

[frightenedmonkey]

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

Anyway, I don't think we have any fundamental disagreements, just more about our definitions. Yeah, you can record some individual things cheaply, but not when you branch out to a full band -- you start to add too many layers of complexity. You said you're really into digital music, what I don't know, and maybe you can clear up, is whether you have experience going into a real studio with an entire band. It's a completely different thing than individually recording music for a game, or doing digital work. I mean, you need a room with decent acoustics (that's somewhere you can play *loud*), good mics, a decent mixer, and then you should probably have a decent recording device (ADAT, 1/2 inch tape, whatever). You can combine any number of these devices when recording solo, or eliminate them if you're purely digital.

Also, recording isn't necessarily par for the course when writing songs, and shouldn't be considered part of writing a song in the first place. I mean, some bands are about different things. My band is all about the live show, someone like, um, Nine Inch Nails, is all about recording, which is not to say they don't tour, but you get the point. For those that love playing live, having a recording is simply a way to get more people to come to your show via airplay or reviews. Now, someone who's more interested in the recording aspect of music, as you seem to be, might not care about the whole performance aspect (though it may be part of the equation), and so recording, reproduction, and related costs may then be much more a part of the whole than a band that's primarily interested in playing live. Of course, neither am I trying to suggest that going into the studio is a burden ;)

I've gone through this process of recording, mixing, mastering, and duplicating a few times now with various bands. I'm not exaggerating the costs. In 1995, the band I was in put out an EP, and we recording five songs in four hours in an adequate studio with a crappy engineer. That cost us $700, the fact that the songs sounded decent is a testament to the amount of practice time we put in, although there are still some glaring mistakes that should've been fixed with overdubs, but we didn't have enought time to listen critically enough to catch them. The duplication costs were around $1200 to $1500 (I don't remember exactly). That was as low budget as I've seen, and the total cost still came to somewhere around $2000. As the recording quality goes up, so do the costs of recording. Professional duplication costs are a very annoying reality. I don't know how to stress enough that you can't get by selling a CD-R at a rock show. Yeah, maybe as a demo that you sell for $5 a pop, but you often can't get them into stores (especially without a UPC code, although some smaller places are better about this than others), and it doesn't help your image as a professional band. Neither does it help you if you only rely on digital downloads, as a lot of people in the indie rock world buy CDs at shows, and will probably forget the URL by the time they get home. If they really like you, maybe they'll sign your mailing list (not a sure thing), and you can market to them there. I think digital downloads are a decent adjunct to the physical thing, and an indie band (not necessarily someone like you) that's only putting out their stuff on CD-R's probably hasn't spent the time and money to record a high quality album either. I'd like to see that change.

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?

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. :^)

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.

Yes: By December

[KFury]

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

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.

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: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 ?

[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...

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.

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???

$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

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

[tjstork]

This is the worst thing imaginable..!!!

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.

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.

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.

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..

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)...

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: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.

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.

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: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...

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.

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: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.

Apple: Read This

[The-Perl-CD-Bookshel]

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

Also, you could allow people who purchased an iPod to download one song for free off of each album on indie.iTunes.com. As it stands now, if you were going to fill a 30GB iPod the legit way, it would cost you about $7,500 (assuming that you only store music on your iPod). IPods would fly off of the shelves, as would some great music that needs a chance!

Re: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.