Selling your music online Part 2 - Tunecore
In Part 1 of Selling your music online we looked at moving CD’s through CD Baby. In this installment we are going to start to look at some of the services to distribute your music digitally ie downloading it over the internet rather than shipping a physical CD. While Cd’s still outsell digital downloads, that trend is changing rapidly as technology expands and people become more computer savvy.
There are many services now to help you to sell your music digitally such as iTunes, Rhapsody, Napster etc. Some of these services can be difficult to use as they are sometimes geared to dealing with large, professional record companies rather than a million individual bands and artists. This is where a company like Tunecore comes in. Tunecore allows you to submit your music to them for a small fee, they in turn deal with getting your music listed with many digital distributors such as iTunes and the others mentioned previously. This is particularly convenient for the independant band or artist and is much more efficient than trying to contact all those distributors yourself.
From their site:
How does it work?
TuneCore has arrangements with leading digital music retailers that let us place your music in their online stores and subscription services. You get 100% of the money that your music earns.
What’s it cost?
TuneCore charges $0.99 per track, $0.99 per store per album, and $9.98 per album per year storage and maintenance.
for example:
“Say you’ve got a five-song Album you want for sale in the iTunes U.S., Japan and iTunes Canada stores as well as on the Rhapsody service. The costs would be:
iTunes U.S. store $0.99
iTunes Canada store $0.99
iTunes Japan store $0.99
Rhapsody service $0.99
Five songs at $0.99 each $4.95
First year’s maintenance $9.98
GRAND TOTAL $18.89” *Note. all prices are in US$
Once you have paid the fee to list your album on a particular service, there are no “per sale” fees at all. You get to keep 100% of the money paid by the particular selling service. Pretty cool huh?
Tunecore also offer other related services such as CD manufacture and T-shirt/Poster printing.
For more info check out their site at http://www.tunecore.com/. You can also download a free e-book with some great music marketing tips.
January 22nd, 2008 at 1:41 pm
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March 6th, 2008 at 5:44 pm
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