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Sell Your Music on iTunes Music Store
Photo_Designer writes "CD Baby is now accepting music to be sold via digital distibution through iTunes Music Store, Listen.com and others. Their cut is 9 percent. The artists get 91 percent of the sale and retain all the rights to their music. There is a $40 fee for each album submitted. It will be interesting to see how much indie music gets on and how it does. Imagine being a touring indie band and be able to tell people to go to iTunes and buy your songs; it seems this could be a huge boon to musicians wanting to circumvent/boycott/avoid/destroy the RIAA." Note that this is not an agreement to get on iTMS or any other service, only for CD Baby to be your distributor. iTMS can still reject your sorry attempt at fame.
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.
"What we have here is a failure to communicate"
The Warden, Cool Hand Luke
that pudge is harboring some ill will from a previous failed attempt at a career in indie music.
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
Life isn't like a box of chocolates. It's more like a jar of jalapenos. What you do today, might burn your ass tomorrow.
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%?
To understand recursion,
you must first understand recursion.
Forget about Joe (or Jill) Artist, what about middle grade artists that have been perpetually screwed by their RIAA contracts.
Galium Arsenide is the material of the future, and always will be.
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.
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.
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...
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
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!
$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.
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?
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
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.
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
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!
True, anything with the MS name on it will get ridiculed severely on slashdot. Thats just the culture here. Also true, slashdot harbors a lot of goodwill towards apple.
That being said, there are fundamental differences between the apple and buymusic.com approaches to treating their customers. Apple has uniform licensing which guarantees unlimited burns, simultaneous access to the music on 3 computers (with the option to change the computers as often as you wish), and unlimited transfers to an iPod. (apple needs to add support for more players)
BuyMusic.com offers none of these things. Songs are tied to ONE computer, without the ability to change that. Depending upon the particular song, burns and transfers to a (select) number of mp3 players is limited to a discrete number.
I've ordered a number of CDs from CDbaby recently in all cases after being in touch with the artist themselves - to find out where I could get their music from.
These guys are good, they have a range of shipping options that make it possible to order internationally with no hassle - they'll ship cds with no cases so that it can go via post as opposed to package.
The artists seem reasonably happy with their cut, in fact one told me that it was the first time he was able to pay his rent with CD sales.
This may sound like an advert, but they really were a pleasant suprise. As i like music, that's mainly non-stream especially with the slashdot crowd (modern jazz & real fusion), it was great to find an outlet which stocked these.
-- ac
I'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
(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.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Thats what they did with my CD!
Quack, quack.
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..
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!
Schrodinger's cat is either dead or really pissed off...
Given the $40 entry fee, the 91:9 profit ratio with CDBaby, the 40:60 profit ratio with Apple, and assuming that people only download singles for $0.99 each, it would only take 111 downloads of your band's songs to break-even. Not bad!!
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
Most record deals with emerging artists ususally take around 70-90% of the profits from album sales (after artificially inflated production costs). TLC, one of the biggest acts of the early 90's sold over 10 million copies of their album 'waterfalls' and walked away with about 170k$ each (do the math).
Basically, artists could sell about 1/10th (or less) of the records online as they normally would through normal channels and make more money!
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.
You like your Macintosh better than me, don't you Dave? Dave? Can you hear me Dave?
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.
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... :)
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!
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".
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.
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.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
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.
If you read through their little presentation, it's actually $40 per album plus a one-time fee of $35 to set up a cdbaby account. That's still not horribly bad.
My only worry with this is that as far as I can tell, CDBABY isn't *required* to do anything.. they have to attempt to get you on these services but if the services all reject you, you still have spent $40.
Moreover, it *appears* from the contract that if you want out-- like, in the unlikely event if iTunes Music Store doesn't accept you through cdbaby, but you later find a way you can get on iTMS not through CDBaby, but you are bound by CDBaby to go through them-- you can do so without penalty, but not until either three and a half years from the start of the agreement or until CDBaby wants to change the terms of your contract, whichever comes first.. that's much better than it could be, of course, the contract isn't limitless and you can get out freely after that block of time, but it decreases the ability to do this kind of thing just as a what-the-heck kind of thing.
Here's the thing I can't figure out from the contract. If you sign up with them, do they have exclusive rights to ALL online distribution, or only online distribution through the services that CDBaby works with such as iTMS? In essence, if I signed up with them, would I still be able to distribute mp3s on my own website of the material signed over to them? The little slide-show seems to imply this would be allowed, but 8ai and 8aiii in the contract seem to say that CDBaby has been given an exclusive right to this as well.
Anyway, definitely interesting. I'd like to see if there's any other way to get onto iTMS or other services first as a complete independent, but I will definitely keep these CDBaby people in mind..
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
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
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.
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.
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.
"Perhaps most amazingly, votaries of 'diversity' insist on absolute conformity." -- Tony Snow
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!
I don't keep a lid on my coffee so when I walk around I look busy -me