Selling Your Recordings Digitally - CD Baby, Tunecore.......

[spongebob]

We're going to recording an EP just after Christmas, and will be putting it out digitally soon after. Artwork all ready to go!

My last band did the same, but the 'band leader' took care of it, so my knowledge is limited.

I think he uploaded through Tunecore - seemed to be quite quick and easy, and the stuff is still up there on Amazon, iTunes, etc. Saw some of it for sale in some place in America last week! Because he dealt with it and we split up, I've go no idea how many were ever sold, and never received a penny!

Has anyone on BC done this? If so, any tips on the best 'seller' to go with? They all seem to be in $.

Do I assume that once you pay the fee, it's available digitally forever through the normal sites?

Any tips and experience welcome. [size=4] [/size]

[redstriper]

[url="https://awal.com/"]https://awal.com/[/url]

I used these, it's free and effective.

[BigRedX]

There is no right answer.

You have to look at what each of the digital aggregators offers and pick the one that you think gives you the best deal based on what you hope to sell.

Start by checking out the following:

[url=http://www.catapultdistribution.com]Catapult[/url]

[url=http://www.cdbaby.com]CD Baby[/url]

[url=http://www.thegenepool.co.uk]Genepool[/url]

[url=http://www.properdistribution.com]Proper Music Distribution[/url]

[url=http://routenote.com]RouteNote[/url]

[url=http://www.tunecore.com]TuneCore[/url]

[url=http://awal.com]AWAL[/url]

All of them will get you on the most important services - iTunes, Amazon and Spotify. After that its just a question of looking at what each charges as fixed costs and percentages of sales and see what you think is going to end up giving you the best deal.

[bjelkeman]

It is quite amazing how the music industry has changed. We are just in the same position, and I am looking around for the "best" alternative.

[bertbass]

Tunecore for us. Gets you onto itunes and as many others as you want to pay for. You pay annually and again the price is dependant on the number of stores you have chosen. You get paid for streaming, but not a lot and more for sales of songs and you cash in when there's enough cash to make it worthwhile.

[Spoombung]

Also looking into it.

Any more experiences here? Tunecore seems to be the new darling but I was wondering what people think of Bandcamp too

[BigRedX]

[quote name='Spoombung' timestamp='1386930335' post='2306468']
Any more experiences here? Tunecore seems to be the new darling but I was wondering what people think of Bandcamp too
[/quote]

I've now had experience of 3 of the main aggregators and TBH they are all equally good and bad. They all take ages to get you your first payment, but after that provided that you keep selling and streaming regularly, the money keeps coming in regularly. Since they all offer slightly different pricing structures you need to look at set up fees against sales percentages and decide whether you are looking at long term or short term profits and then go with the one that offers [b]YOU[/b] the best deal.

Bandcamp is really a completely different distribution system, in that it's a separate self-contained service. You don't get your music on iTunes, Amazon etc. However, if your audience is hip and sufficiently tech-savvy then it can work for you, in that being on Bandcamp can make you seem part of something at bit "cooler" than the mainstream. However IMO it doesn't have the sense of community between the various artists on there that an isolated service like that really needs in order the bring the added value that is missing from not being on the main downloading and streaming services. Remember though most listeners want quick and easy which means downloading direct from iTMS to iTunes or onto their phone. Anything else will be too complicated and be rejected.

[Skybone]

No matter how much you try to sell your music, and no matter how much time, effort & financial input you and the rest of your band put into making the best recording you can...

There's always some freeloading numpty's who expect you to give them a copy for free... more these days thanks to "free" downloads on Blogs and other sources.

And I've had numerous "discussions" with folk on various forums (fora/forii?) be they musician or just music related, there are still more people arguing that you should give your music away for free.

IMO o'course.

[LeftyJ]

Whatever aggregator you choose, ALWAYS sell through Bandcamp as well! None of the digital distribution sites require exclusivity, you are always free to use a different in-store distributor and/or your own webshop or Bandcamp simultaneously. It works like a charm! My band uses CDbaby, Bandcamp and we also have our album in consignment with an in-store distributor that operates in the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxemburg (Sonic Rendezvous).

I wrote out a whole 8-page comparison of several aggregators and Bandcamp for my band when we were in your position a year ago. I wish I could share it here, but it's all in Dutch! I looked at Bandcamp, CDbaby, Rebeat, Songflow and Tunecore. We chose CDbaby because they've been in the business the longest, have a good reputation, a large network of retailers, they can sell and distribute physical CD's too, and their rates seemed fair. In the end we didn't use CDbaby for physical CD's, because they only stock 5 pieces at first. The shipping costs would get very expensive if we'd have to send them just small numbers of CD's per mail every time. Shipping to the USA is expensive!

Personally I'm very happy with CDbaby so far, but if I were to do it all over again today, I'd probably pick Rebeat. Their list of retailers is HUGE, their computer application appears very easy to use, and they charge a one-time fee of €99 and after that it's only €1 per song, €5 for a barcode for your album or single, and €1 per song to request an ISRC-code which seems fair. If you're planning on doing more than one release, that's fairly affordable. Only downside is they require a Credit Card to charge all your payments. No PayPal or bank transfer or whatever! They do pay you by bank transfer though.

Bandcamp just requires a PayPal account for all payments, and is very easy to use. What's very cool about Bandcamp is that you can also offer your album on presale, before the actual release date. You can offer any number of tracks for immediate download at purchase, and you can ship out the CD's later. Bandcamp will release the other tracks for download as soon as you've manually confirmed the release date has been reached. That way, you can more or less use Bandcamp for "crowdfunding" too! Most of our sales (aside from CD sales at gigs) went via Bandcamp

[BigRedX]

LeftyJ, Can you please explain the advantages of Bandcamp because the site themselves seem to be so rubbish at doing it.

As a consumer why would I want to buy a download from them when iTMS integrates so perfectly with iTunes and the various mobile music services do the same with whatever mobile device/phone I have?

As a producer of music I could see the point if the site was more of community, but there is nothing that indicates that. If there was an element of "if you liked that music you've just bought you might also like this…" recommendations, I could be persuaded, but all I see is a collection of individual isolated pages that just happen to be on Bandcamp's servers.

Even physical sales can be just as easily done from my band's own website and that way we get to keep a larger percentage of the purchase price, and because all the band's merchandise is on the same page, someone buying the new EP may well decide to get a T-shirt as well while they are there - something that you don't appear to be able to do from Bandcamp.

I'm also not a fan of physical distribution deals without having a proper record company to back them up. IME they take a lot of time and effort to set up, it ties up a proportion of your stock, and you'll be very lucky to get the all money and any unsold stock back at the end of the deal. In the current economic climate there are less and less record shops about and if your audience can buy the records or CD on line anyway what is the point? A friend lost over half their stock when their distributor went bust back when these things should have been far more secure. Personally I wouldn't take the risk now.

In the end selling through an Aggregator is mostly vanity selling unless you get lucky. My band sells about 10 times as many copies of our two EPs at gigs then we do from our web site or as downloads combined.

[LeftyJ]

[quote name='BigRedX' timestamp='1386936089' post='2306562']
LeftyJ, Can you please explain the advantages of Bandcamp because the site themselves seem to be so rubbish at doing it.[/quote]

In my opinion, the main advantages are:[list]
[*]You can offer your album both as a download (in many different file formats) and on CD;
[*]You can easily set up preorders for fans as a means of crowdfunding your release;
[*]It's fairly easy to personalise your page or integrate your webshop into your website and vice versa, and onto your social media pages;
[*]You can generate free download codes for promotion of your album and for sending to various media. These can only be used once, and not be passed on, so this is a fairly safe method and has served us well for reaching reviewers. Bookers on the other hand tend to do absolutely nothing with them, they generally can't be arsed to go through the effort of downloading anything;
[*]You can easily pass around discount codes;
[*]Fans are free to pay more than your asking price, and you'll be surprised how many fans actually do. We were!
[/list]
[quote name='BigRedX' timestamp='1386936089' post='2306562']
Even physical sales can be just as easily done from my band's own website and that way we get to keep a larger percentage of the purchase price, and because all the band's merchandise is on the same page, someone buying the new EP may well decide to get a T-shirt as well while they are there - something that you don't appear to be able to do from Bandcamp.[/quote]

[url="http://evesfall.bandcamp.com/merch"]You can[/url] . And on Bandcamp you get most of the price. Bandcamp just takes 15% on downloads and 10% on merchandise and physical CD's, and then there's the PayPal transaction cost of course. All in all we get to keep about 75-80% of sales.

[quote name='BigRedX' timestamp='1386936089' post='2306562']
I'm also not a fan of physical distribution deals without having a proper record company to back them up. IME they take a lot of time and effort to set up, it ties up a proportion of your stock, and you'll be very lucky to get the all money and any unsold stock back at the end of the deal.[/quote]

I agree with you on that, but there are more options here. The way we do it, our album is in consignment with a distributor. They requested 50 copies for their stock. They send us a monthly automated email with our sales for the month, and we can send an invoice as soon as the combined sales reach €160. It's easy, it barely costs us any time, and they only needed 50 CD's of our stock. I agree that without a record company backing them up and promoting your release, a construction like this will not do much for your sales. We also made a bit of a mistake here: we were offered a great purchase price for our CD's, but this leads to excessively high in-store prices being charged for our album! We didn't think of that beforehand, we just thought "Oh great, big profits!" For example, we sell our CD for €10 at gigs and on Bandcamp (we're free to ask whatever we want, no limitations here from our distributor), but in the largest record webshop in the Netherlands it'll cost you €18,49...

[quote name='BigRedX' timestamp='1386936089' post='2306562']
In the end selling through an Aggregator is mostly vanity selling unless you get lucky. My band sells about 10 times as many copies of our two EPs at gigs then we do from our web site or as downloads combined.[/quote]

Same here, our sales revenue through CDbaby is just about double of what it cost us to set up the account. Bandcamp revenue on the other hand is about equal to our sales at gigs!

Edited December 13, 2013 by LeftyJ

[skankdelvar]

May I thank the gents above for their clear explanations of an area which I have previously failed to understand.

Really useful

[spongebob]

+1 great responses, I too am being educated!

Do I assume that the yearly fee on say, Tunecore, mean that if you stop paying after the first year (for example), that your releases are removed from sale from the various sites?

If this is the case, is a free site like Awal (suggested above) a better bet?

Edited December 13, 2013 by spongebob

[redstriper]

Awal is based in Sheffield UK, very easy to use, good response by email to questions and completely free.
I didn't look at the small print and I didn't compare with any others.
They got my albums in all the right places fast.

[BigRedX]

They all seem to manage to get your music on the major digital download sites within a few days. The times when you had to wait for weeks if not a couple of months before your release showed up on iTunes are long gone.

Interestingly when we put out our second single we uploaded it well in advance and set a specific release date. It showed up on Amazon within a couple of days but it was only available for pre-order and you couldn't actually download it until the release date. It didn't show up on iTunes until just a few seconds into the day of the release.

[mcnach]

[quote name='spongebob' timestamp='1386870404' post='2305766']
We're going to recording an EP just after Christmas, and will be putting it out digitally soon after. Artwork all ready to go!

My last band did the same, but the 'band leader' took care of it, so my knowledge is limited.

I think he uploaded through Tunecore - seemed to be quite quick and easy, and the stuff is still up there on Amazon, iTunes, etc. Saw some of it for sale in some place in America last week! Because he dealt with it and we split up, I've go no idea how many were ever sold, and never received a penny!

Has anyone on BC done this? If so, any tips on the best 'seller' to go with? They all seem to be in $.

Do I assume that once you pay the fee, it's available digitally forever through the normal sites?

Any tips and experience welcome.
[/quote]


we went through "emubands".
That way we did not have to worry about anything and our CD is on iTunes, Googleplay, amazon, spotify... the lot.
That's for digital copies.
We also set up a Bandcamp account for physical CDs, sold directly by us.
It works.

[redstriper]

I went with Awal because they were recommended by PRS and because they do not charge any fees for bar codes or anything else.
Release dates can be scheduled and the product is on all the important sites including Spotify, iTunes etc.
I think they take 15% on sales.

[Mornats]

This is a great post with some fantastic info in it. I think this deserves a sticky

[Spoombung]

Agreed. Great thread. Thank you for the responses.

[rOB]

Excellent thread thanks for all the info.

[spongebob]

[quote name='Mornats' timestamp='1387023215' post='2307493']
This is a great post with some fantastic info in it. I think this deserves a sticky
[/quote]

+1. Loads of valuable links and info to refer to.

[krysh]

anybody mentioned [url="http://bandcamp.com"]bandcamp.com[/url] yet?

[BigRedX]

Juast read through this thread again and picked up a couple of things that I missed first time around.

1. Barcodes. All aggregators will insist on your release having one and most will charge you extra. Unless you are going to be selling physical product in shops then it's not so much the actual "barcode" you need so much as the numbers which uniquely identify your product and which are required whether it's digital downloads or actual physical media. You could join the relevant organisations and generate your own, but unless you plan on lots of releases it won't be very cost effective. If you do decide to go this route make sure that you are able to make UPC12 codes rather than EAN13, because most US-based aggregators will insist upon 12 digit codes. You can always turn a UPC12 into an EAN13 by adding a "0" to the beginning. You only need one barcode for each product (single/EP/album etc.)

2. ISRC codes. Anyone charging you money for these is ripping you off. In the UK you can join the PPL for free as a label, and you should do if you are releasing your own music. They will then issue you with your unique ISRC prefix which you can use to create your own codes for each track on your releases. Each track needs it's own unique ISRC.

[EliasMooseblaster]

[quote name='BigRedX' timestamp='1386936089' post='2306562']
LeftyJ, Can you please explain the advantages of Bandcamp because the site themselves seem to be so rubbish at doing it.

As a consumer why would I want to buy a download from them when iTMS integrates so perfectly with iTunes and the various mobile music services do the same with whatever mobile device/phone I have?
[/quote]

There's another advantage which I don't think has been covered here: Bandcamp has a certain "audiophile" appeal. Obviously it gives the impression that you're dealing more directly with the artist when you buy their music (your Paypal payment does indeed go to the artist's account rather than, say straight to iTunes) but also they give you the option to download in a lossless audio format, or a high-quality lossy format of your choice. And the aforementioned "name your price" option does seem to work well for a lot of artists (well, certainly for Steve Lawson!)

[Lw.]

It's worth looking down the list of MERLIN members to possibly find a label nearer to you - MERLIN aggregate for a lot of the indies & generally get better rates with the digital services then the labels otherwise could.

Having worked at a DSP for a few years I always found Tunecore to be good to deal with, though none of them were particularly bad.

It's worth repeating that Bandcamp is a completely different route than going through an aggregator - really you should be doing both. Bandcamp for selling to fans, aggregators for promotion - the streaming services are only really a promotion tool, you'll never make real money from them.

Let me know if anyone wants to know specifics about how the money flows through services like Spotify etc... It's pretty boring stuff but sometimes worth knowing if you want to make money from music.