With the announcement last week that Apple will remove digital rights restrictions from their entire catalogue in the iTunes Store and with the glut of well-stocked competitive digital distribution points such as eMusic and 7Digital, now is a good time for independent musicians to get their songs up on the web to benefit from digital sales. It can be a bit bewildering trying to find out how at times so here are the best options available to help you on your way.
The two main digital distro players in the market are CDBaby.com and Tunecore.com. Both offer your music on the biggest sites including iTunes, eMusic, and Amazon MP3 along with a host of other services and both will make no claim on your copyright.
CDBaby offers physical distribution as well as digital, takes a 9% cut from your sales, costs a once-off fee of $35 to setup and charges $20 for a universal barcode which is required for every album sold by law. Tunecore deals only in digital distribution, takes no cut of your sales but charge an annual maintenance fee of $20 to keep your album up on its partners. The initial setup is about $20 also but a barcode is provided free of charge. Unlike CDBaby which requires you to post them a physical CD, Tunecore allows you to upload lossless files to their server on the spot.
Whether you choose one over the other depends on the volume of sales you’re expecting. Tunecore is the most profitable if you’re expecting to sell over 400 downloads of individual tracks but CDBaby also offer to distribute your album from their site physically. Other similar services worth looking into before you decide are Songcastmusic.com, iodalliance.com while 7Digital’s Indiestore service is worth a look as it allows you to setup your own self-generated shop for a 20% cut of all sales with no other costs.
However, If iTunes and the other bigger stores aren’t a priority and your target audience is an impulsive mobile-phone obsessed 15-year old, a good local alternative is DownloadMusic.ie which offers the ability to download songs by text message. Now you just have to figure out how to get people to buy the damn thing…
January 16th, 2009 at 4:00 pm
Thanks for the mention, though I’d say one only needs to sell your album three or four times within the entire first year and you’re in the clear, if you go through TuneCore: everything after that is gravy. If you haven’t sold beyond that after 12 months, hey, you don’t have to keep it up another year, just let it expire.
But we figure people really care about their music, that they put it into the world’s largest stores because they want it to be heard, and bought, and they intend it to sell more than three times in a year. They may not want to become the next U2, but they want to see a return, and it’s not our place to take a profit off their success: that’s why we take 0%.
Thanks again for the mention. If you or any of your readers have any questions about us or the industry, feel free to drop me a line.
-Peter