Improve Your Music

OK, you’ve spent your hard earned money putting together a recording of your band, you’ve had some copies pressed and now you are wondering how you are going to get rid of them to get your money back or even make a profit! Sure you can sell a few at gigs and a few to your friends, but how do you move more than just a few copies? Just because you aren’t signed to a record label doesn’t mean that you can’t sell your music online. The internet is a great way for the independent act to bypass to whole record company thing and put some money directly in their own pocket.

There are a variety of services available these days to allow independent artists and bands to sell their stuff. This is the first part of a series of articles that will look at some of the more popular methods of online music marketing.

First cab off the rank is CD Baby – www.cdbaby.net

CD Baby is a simple service that sets up a basic web page for you in their online store. You send them some CD’s and set your own price. When someone comes along that wants your CD, CD Baby handles the credit card processing and the postage. They take a $4US fee for this and pass the rest on to you. Simple!

From their site:

Who/What are we?

• CD Baby is a little online record store that sells CDs by independent musicians.
• [In•de•pen•dent: (adj.) Not having sold one’s life, career, and creative works over to a corporation.]
• We’re just a few people in a cool Portland, Oregon, CD warehouse that looks like a playground. We listen to every CD we sell before we sell it, so we can help you find other albums you’ll like.
• We only sell CDs that come directly from the musicians. No distributors. Musicians send us CDs. We warehouse them, sell them to you, and pay the musicians directly.
• Cool thing: in a regular record deal or distribution deal, musicians only make $1-$2 per CD, if they ever get paid by their label. When selling through CD Baby, musicians make $6-$12 per CD, and get paid weekly.
• In business, and thriving, since March 1998. We’re the largest seller of independent CDs on the web.

Selling your music

• CD Baby has helped over 150,000 artists sell over $40 million in physical CDs, digital downloads, and live sales since 1998.
• For a simple $35 setup, CD Baby can get your music selling worldwide on cdbaby.com, Apple iTunes, Yahoo Music, Best Buy, Rhapsody, Napster, MSN Music and more.
• We keep only a 9% cut, paying 91% of all income directly to the artist. (For physical CDs, we keep $4 per CD sold.)
• Your CD will be available to over 2400 traditional retail CD stores in the USA. You get paid full retail price for these sales.
• We pay everyone every Monday night. Over $250,000 every week, paid directly to our musician clients.

To get started with CD baby you only need to send them 5 CD’s and $35US. This is quite a small investment for what you get. As well as selling your CD’s by mail order, they digitise your CD and make it available for sale through iTunes, Yahoo, MSN etc. The potential for selling your music through multiple outlets makes CD Baby a great first step in selling your music online.

Check them out at www.cdbaby.net

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