Online CD Stores
Consignment will only get your music into a few local stores. With the Internet, all musicians are global. While some people want digital music, there are still many people who want physical CDs. Online CD stores are the way to do this, unless you want to set yourself up as an online merchant, and want to deal with packing, shipping, and handling orders.
When you evaluate online CD stores, make sure that the front page of the website looks like a store, and not an ad for musicians to sell their music. When you go there, imagine that you are a music fan, and not a musician at all. Ask yourself where you'd go to buy music. If the online store front page talks mostly about being a great place for bands to sell music, don't use them. They are probably there to just take money from indies.
You can find out any website's customer base by looking at the services that are emphasized on the front page. On any good online music store, the storefront will be about selling music, with perhaps one link about where bands can go to sell music. Even better, it should be buried pretty far into the retailer's site, as Amazon.com's is.
If you use a store that seems to be friendly to indies, make sure to read the agreement. We can't emphasize this enough: DO NOT SIGN UP FOR ANY SERVICES THAT TAKE THE RIGHTS TO YOUR MUSIC. The music store is there to sell your music but they should not get any more rights to your music than a grocery store gets to the breakfast cereal that they sell. Read the agreement carefully!
You can be on as many online CD stores as you wish. There are two online stores that we can recommend at this point, but they are not the only ones available. Once we found stores we were happy with, we stopped wanting to pay setup fees to get onto more stores. At the same time, we'd love to hear suggestions and investigate other stores if you have any recommendations.
CDBaby
Our top suggestion for online CD Stores is CDBaby.com. We have used them for years and are wildly happy about their services. Their price structure is simple: There is a one-time setup fee, and from then on, CDBaby keeps the first $4 of each CD you sell, and you get the rest of the money. If you charge $10, you'll get $6 a CD. If you charge more, you'll get more.
We've been happy with their services for many reasons. Here is a short list of advantages we found with CD Baby:
- Feedback from customers: When the customer's buy the CD, they have an option to say where they found out about your music. This has been invaluable to us as a way to find out how people are hearing about us. You will also get their email address.
- Digital Distribution: You can choose to have all albums also digitally distributed on all of the major services.
- Presence in Tower Records: CDBaby has a kiosk in Tower records where customers can get your music.
- Suggestions: They give you suggestions of how to market and sell your music. Their regular emails have turned out to have surprisingly useful advice.
There is a much longer list of benefits, and we suggest that you read here (http://cdbaby.net) on their site if you’d like to get an idea of their offerings.
The store was created by Derek Sivers, who is an interesting person in his own right and is one of the few voices that speaks for independent bands. The related site, CDBaby.org, has discussions of topics that are of interest to musicians, as well as links to sites that have good advice.
Amazon.com
Amazon.com has a program for selling music from independent bands. Their deal is slightly less advantageous than CDBaby's, as they take a percentage of the profits, rather than a flat fee of $4 per disc. But Amazon.com is a site that gets enormous amounts of traffic, so there is a good chance of making sales there.