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| selling your MP3s directly on cdbaby.com |
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Don't you love it when you find out that something you already have can do much more than you realized?
Check this out, and hopefully you will bob your head and say, "Niiiiiiiice...." in your cool-but-impressed voice.
You know you can sell your entire album as MP3 downloads directly from your cdbaby.com page, right?
But did you also know:
* - You can set the price at whatever you want, anytime you want.
* - You get 91% of the MP3 selling price! Set it to $15? You make $13.65. Set it to $8? You make $7.28. That's way more money in your pocket than ANY other store can give you.
* - You get to know WHO bought your music immediately! Their name, email, location, and everything is permanently saved in your account so you can keep in touch with your fans. (No other store gives you this.)
* - You get paid the following week, unlike other stores that make you wait up to 2 months.
* - Not to brag, but we've sold over $600,000 in MP3 downloads in the last few months, with NO marketing or announcements at all. That already puts CD Baby ahead of Emusic, Yahoo Music, Sony Connect, Verizon, MSN Music, Snocap and every company except iTunes, Rhapsody, and Napster, as you can see here : http://cdbaby.org/stories/07/09/07/3490238.html
* - Customers buy your entire album as one zip download, which includes not just the MP3s, but also a JPG of the album art, and a text file of song titles, album notes, and links back to your websites!
* - They're regular MP3 files that play easy on ANY MP3 player your fans use, whether iPod, cellphone, Blackberry, iPhone, Nokia, Windows, Mac, Linux, etc.
* - The MP3s are encoded at top-audiophile-quality (~200k VBR), higher than iTunes or any other major store.
* - See http://cdbaby.com/mp3
Niiiiiiiice, huh?
:-)
--
Derek Sivers, CD Baby, http://cdbaby.com
the only MP3 store that really loves you
P.S. To change the selling price of your MP3 album, just go to https://members.cdbaby.com/ to log in, then click [YOUR ITEMS] up top, EDIT ALBUM INFO next to your album, and edit "Basic important album info". All changes are instant.
P.P.S. Want to see how the MP3-album-download process works, so you know what to tell your fans? Temporarily set your MP3 album price to $5, visit your own page to buy it with your credit card or PayPal account, download it to see how it works, and you'll get $4.55 on your next check, as you would with any other sale. (Your $5 sale minus our 9% cut.) So in the end that educational research project would have only cost you a whopping 45 cents. Try it!
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LONG LIVE CD BABY!! I am proud to be a fellow musician on CD Baby. Thanks for that great advice Derek! He is the man with the master plan.
-Riley from 'Vocal Vanguard'
http://cdbaby.com/cd/vocalvanguard
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Thanks for all you tasty tips!
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Love the fact that Mp3's are generating great income without any advertising, but the fact that you guys don't heavily promote it puts quite a load on the artist. While it feels great getting a couple bucks more than on iTunes. We have sold 10 times as many downloads on iTunes as we have on CDBaby. Just imagine what those numbers would be if you did promote the Mp3's a little more. Just a thought.
www.cdbaby.com/repertoire2
www.myspace.com/repertoire
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Just imagine what would happen if YOU promoted the MP3 downloads a little more. You could contribute to your own sales directly by promoting it yourself, eh?
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Do we have to do anything on our part to initiate mp3 sale? such as the steps you mentioned in the p.s. or is everything in place already?
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You need to do the following things (if you haven't already):
1) sign up for digital distribution
2) complete the info in the SONG DETAIL section
3) once we "inspect" that information to make sure its accurate you'll be asked to "finalize" the info for digital distribution
4) choose the price you'd like your full-album MP3 download to sell for on cdbaby.com. To do this, go to your member account's BASIC IMPORTANT ALBUM INFO section (in the "edit menu").
That is it!
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I wonder why CD Baby haven't delivered my album to eMusic or Rhapsody after I have requested for them to send it to them on numerous occasions.
My music is played on radio stations world wide and they tell their listeners that they can find my music on cdbaby.com, iTunes, eMusic, Rhapsody, and Napster. Guest what? The listeners can't find it on eMusic or Rhapsody when they look for it there.
I just wish CD Baby wouldn't tell us that they deliver to these sites when it is clear that they do not.
I am not being hateful. I love what CD Baby has done for me. I even delivered them my new release. I just wish I hadn't told the stations airing my music that their audience could find the music on Rhapsody or eMusic.
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There are some sites, including emusic that have never had my music up, even though they were listed as have recieved my music... though most were marginal. The only ones that count are the big ones anyway...iTunes and the like, and Cdbaby of course.
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We make deliveries to Rhapsody and eMusic all the time. Rhapsody happens to be very backlogged at the moment, though, so it does take some time. eMusic generally likes to take our newest content, so if you've been with us for a while and missed out on eMusic,... just write cdbaby@cdbaby.com and request that we send it to them. You'll have to make sure your distribution level is set to 75%. Then we'll take care of it!
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Are you sure that CDBaby is not sending them your album? It could
be that they did, but that eMusic and Rhapsody have simply not put
your music up.
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Yeah, I thought that also, but Chris sent me an email earlier this week and said that he would send it since I made the request for them to send it.
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GMan : sorry since I don't know your real name I don't know
which album you're referring to, but Emusic has asked us to only
send them albums from artists who have opted-in or requested
us to send them. They don't want "everything by default", so
maybe that's why it wasn't sent until you asked.
But Rhapsody, on the other hand, wants absolutely everything
from us ASAP, so maybe there was just some encoding glitch
holding back your album that wasn't noticed until you called
attention to it.
Either way, sorry for the trouble. Always just email
cdbaby@cdbaby.com for best/fastest most helpful response.
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Thanks Derek for the feedback. My album is Sounds of The G... http://cdbaby.com/cd/theg
My new project is call The Sweetness and I already have several smooth jazz radio stations requesting it even before you guys have had a chance to get it up. I pretty much would rather waiting for you all to get it up before I send it to them.
Thanks for all that you and your staff does.
The G...
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Derek,
A CDBABY mp3 widget would make this unstoppable. Any plans
for this? I would love to replace my NIMBIT player with a CDBABY
one.
http://www.iamjen.com
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Derek, you know what might also help boost MP3 downloads from CD Baby?
If customers had the ability to download individual tracks like iTunes, Napster, etc. It would give them the opportunity to purchase just the tracks that they like without having to go to other websites.
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I don't believe most fans of independent artists are just looking for
one song.
I prefer the up-sell to encouraging them to buy the entire album
with one click.
For the occasional person that just wants one song and has no
interest in any of your other music, let them go to iTunes or ANY
other download service online.
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"I don't believe most fans of independent artists are just looking for
one song. " ~ Derek
Have you ever even browsed customer downloads on eMusic? Many cust. do not download entire albums. My own mp3 buying habits have changed since I got an ipod. I get ONLY the songs I want. I never had that option before mp3's.
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Cool. Well luckily there are over 100 outlets that sell almost the
entire CD Baby catalog as single-song downloads. Many of them
are linked directly from every CD page on cdbaby.com to make it
easy for someone who wants a single song to jump there with one
click to buy it.
cdbaby.com is one store where we encourage (require) people to
buy the entire album. So far it's working wonderfully and selling
much more than most of those other places
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I agree with Derek here; there are lots of OTHER outlets for that single song download (and hey, the "song" used to be everything - before the album and LP formats existed).
But as an artist - I like the idea that someone would be willing to download all the tracks; because (hopefully) it's worth it. As a service dedicated to the artist - the Mp3 album download is great. Plus I get a little more scratch with the reasonable 9% that CD Baby takes.
I have definitely seen some MP3 downloads since this service started.
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p.s. If we were to sell single songs, we'd have to take a 30-40% cut
instead of our 9% cut, in order to pay the credit card transaction
fees of 25 cents per sale!
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$600,000 in MP3 downloads in the last few months - you got some stick with the new cdbaby post around august (not from most it must be said) - i really hope you think it was all worth it because it was certainly, and the figures don't lie... well done and thanks for all the efforts... you make it so easy for us to concentrate on the music and so easy for consumers as well...
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How can I use CDBaby for DD and not iTunes or any of the others?
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If you'd like to sell downloads ONLY on cdbaby.com, just sign up for digital distribution like normal.
But then go to the HOW MUCH DISTRIBUTION section of your account and set the distribution level to 0%.
That will allow sales on cdbaby.com, put prevent deliveries to any of our digital partners.
However, before you do this... are you sure you don't want to have us send your music to iTunes, Rhapsody, eMusic, Napster, etc.?? Its all included in the price of your initial setup fee.
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What are the chances that cdbaby shall provide the artists with new BUY NOW buttons i.e.
a BUY MP3 button, or a DOWNLOAD NOW button?
Those types of payment buttons would be ideal (& relevant) for an artist's myspace page etc.
Also, what are the chances that artists can sell their singles through the cdbaby mp3 service - as well as complete albums?
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here's a great deal download Darrell Deese mp3 for only 1.50 that's right one dollar and 50cents tell all your friends thanks derek "keep it rockin"
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It's fantastic being able to let listeners get both physical CDs and album downloads in one convenient place. I love it.
One thing that would put the icing on the cake for me, though, would be to have the option to upload a PDF digital booklet that would be incorporated into the ZIP file as well. I think it's a great companion piece to go with any album download to get the full experience with various photos, lyrics and liner notes all in one go. Or possibly even allow incorporating other files such as video clips, with a small monthly service fee to cover the extra storage space and bandwidth for those who opt for the "deluxe" download packages?
I know, you give us an inch and we want a mile, LOL, but CD Baby is getting closer all the time to being a complete solution for music sales, and cranking the download part of the storefront into high gear would eliminate the need to use another service for more elaborate digital album packages. Who knows, perhaps this is something you guys have already pondered for the future.
These musings aside, Derek, thank you as always for all your efforts on behalf of the indie music scene.
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Thank You so much Derek for that MP3 information, and all that you and your staff are doing to help us musians here at CDBABY !Glad to be apart of CDBABY,S future.
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Yeah - this is good!
Thanks Derek - any way we can sell these directly from our web sites?
Hmm. I see someone else has already thought of this.. no surprise there!
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I've made a suggestion for CD Baby to have their own download service over a year ago. nice to see that they're doing it now. A CD baby widget would diffinately be the next great move.
About rhapsody and Emusic, and a few of those other download music services; If you ever notice, the major labels always have their artists up in front of the line on those services. Nobody wants to say it, but there is a major label conspiracy going on in the industry to keep all the indies at bay.
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Actually, I think everybody says it all the time, that Majors would love to squash indies! As indie sales now account for almost a third of music sales, seems like they're not having much luck, thankfully. And I don't see any reason for that to change. Indies are more open to new and different business models, while the Majors' insistence on sticking with the old ways has basically sunk the music business, hurting themselves and all of us indies in the process. Corporate greed will be their karma, hopefully.
I'm pretty confident the reason Major label releases are featured on legal download sites like they are is similar to why they get most radio play, too - money, palm-greasing... payola to put it bluntly. Perhaps not outright payola on the download sites, but perhaps coercive agreements where their catalog is included in the service in return for preferred placement. Just some thoughts...
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As for the comment about single download files....if you are already set up for Digital Distribution, you most likely already have your songs on iTunes available for single download.
If you set the price at CDBaby (for downloading the entire CD) at a reasonable price, then you might actually make more money with the full-CD download. Give your fans an incentive to buy the entire CD instead of buying single downloads at iTunes..
......wouldn't you rather see $5.00 or even $10.00 instead of just .99 cents? I know I would....and, your fans will be happier because they got the CD cheaper than buying it as individual songs on iTunes....
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Derek, YOU ROCK
I distribute digitally my album exclusively with IODA, but can I opt-
in only for the in-site CDBaby mp3 download service?
thanks!
Fer
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As of now, no. I'm sorry. It's something only offered to albums
that are in our Digital Distribution service.
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Hi Fer,
With regards to IODA, you need the read the terms of your agreement.
When I was with IODA, they required you to distribute your material exclusively with them.
Also, as far as I recall, CDBaby's agreement requires you to be exclusively with them.
There is a conflict of interest between IODA and CDBaby. Either you go with one or the other.
Cheers
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| by
on Tuesday March 11 2008 @ 07:03AM PDT [ reply | parent ] |
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[quote]Hi Fer,
With regards to IODA, you need the read the terms of your agreement.
When I was with IODA, they required you to distribute your material exclusively with them.
Also, as far as I recall, CDBaby's agreement requires you to be exclusively with them.
There is a conflict of interest between IODA and CDBaby. Either you go with one or the other.
Cheers [quote]
Hello.
I am with CDBABY and I love it,but....
Ioda are in-fact making distribution for some Digital shops that CDBABY dont do !
just to name some: (beatspot, audiojelly, saikosounds).
This digital outlets are specialized in Electronic music but looks like cdbaby dont want to make the next step and are not looking forward for next generations.
I did a request to have my music distributed in this digital shops but was rejected by cdbaby.(
I am thinking in make direct distribution for this shops, but that will cost me extra money.(
cdbaby its a excellent place for bands, single artists,etc... but I believe they should make a review and refresh connections with more resent and well known electronic music shops.... (are they too underground for cdbaby style ?)
I think not !
This outlets are just too new, but they are taking the music of the Artists to a very large (minority) of underground music Market.
Are cdbaby think in open doors later and start to look around ? or will be - you get what you have here and thats it ?
I try to contact IODA before but I didn't like the approach and at the end ,IODA have just a few digital shops I was interested...
I wish cdbaby can have this shops too !
I Love cdbaby & cdbaby love me already.)
I am very happy with your services but looks like some music styles are left behind.
For more I can look around, cdbaby still the best place for artists.
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You care about 'stoopid' sites with names like audiojelly - come
on, get a life!
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[quote]Hi Fer,
With regards to IODA, you need the read the terms of your agreement.
When I was with IODA, they required you to distribute your material exclusively with them.
Also, as far as I recall, CDBaby's agreement requires you to be exclusively with them.
There is a conflict of interest between IODA and CDBaby. Either you go with one or the other.
Cheers [quote]
Hello.
I am with CDBABY and I love it,but....
Ioda are in-fact making distribution for some Digital shops that CDBABY dont do !
just to name some: (beatspot, audiojelly, saikosounds).
This digital outlets are specialized in Electronic music but looks like cdbaby dont want to make the next step and are not looking forward for next generations.
I did a request to have my music distributed in this digital shops but was rejected by cdbaby.(
I am thinking in make direct distribution for this shops, but that will cost me extra money.(
cdbaby its a excellent place for bands, single artists,etc... but I believe they should make a review and refresh connections with more resent and well known electronic music shops.... (are they too underground for cdbaby style ?)
I think not !
This outlets are just too new, but they are taking the music of the Artists to a very large (minority) of underground music Market.
Are cdbaby think in open doors later and start to look around ? or will be - you get what you have here and thats it ?
I try to contact IODA before but I didn't like the approach and at the end ,IODA have just a few digital shops I was interested...
I wish cdbaby can have this shops too !
I Love cdbaby & cdbaby love me already.)
I am very happy with your services but looks like some music styles are left behind.
For more I can look around, cdbaby still the best place for artists.
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hi Derek,
I'm in the same boat. I hope that you will add an option for digital distro that is "CD Baby only".
cheers,
Leigh
"I distribute digitally my album exclusively with IODA, but can I opt-in only for the in-site CDBaby mp3 download service?"
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Hey Leigh,
You actually CAN do cdbaby.com-downloads ONLY. (though, admittedly, its not the most clearly advertised feature!)
First, sign up for digital distribution.
Then set your distribution percentage to zero (in the HOW MUCH DISTRIBUTION section of your member account).
Lastly, use the "restrictions" link on that same page to let us know you do NOT want CD Baby to deliver your music to any other download sites.
That'll do it!
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As with most of the CD Baby artists, I think that the MP3 download service is a great move. I only wish I shared the same trust that Derek has in customers restraining from making copies of downloads for others.
Although there will be many customers who are honest and have respect for the CD Baby artists (to them, we are extremely grateful!) there is surely going to be a significant amount who will have no scruples about running off one or more copies for their friends.
Someone contacted me recently, asking if I would be interested in swapping MP3s by a well known CD Baby artist of which I own several CDs. I firmly pointed him in the direction of CD Baby and told him to get his hand in his pocket for once! The irony is, after possibly becoming a CD Baby customer, did he then proceed to run off some copies for free?!
As far as illegal CD copying goes, it looks as if we’re stuck with it but I think that some form of DRM on downloads could help prevent some of the loss of revenue suffered by CD Baby and its artists – every little helps. Derek thinks that DRM is disrespectful but respect is a two way thing.
I personally have no problem with a CD Baby customer copying any of my digital download purchases for their in-car entertainment, home CD player etc. but to do it for others (other than for genuine promotion) is just plain stealing.
If only we could see our sales figures in the real world along side those in a totally honest world… might not be such a good idea!
Having said all that… I think CD Baby provides a service to artists and customers which is second to none.
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Some of the most successful digital music services, Amazon and
Emusic, have no DRM at all. Just plain MP3s. And even the massive
major labels are on board.
The only way to put DRM on downloads is to use Windows Media,
which then means that download would not play on hardly any
portable devices. (No iPod, no cellphones, etc.)
So - no DRM.
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Hi Chris,
Derek's definitely right with regards to keeping digital files that are sold on CDBaby free of copy protection.
Some people may copy your music but a lot more people will hear your music as well as a result of open, digital formats.
DRM formats are draconian. Who really wants to fuss with DRM on their Microsoft certified machines/software?
And think of how hard it will be in 10 years to port all these locked formats to new devices... It just doesn't make long-term sense.
Vinyl, CD, and Cassettes were/are all open formats. Granted there was less piracy back in those days, but music is really about sharing soul energy and connecting people... Somehow we have to find another solution to this issue.
Cheers
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If you read my last posting again, you’ll see that I’ve used the words “some form of DRM”. After all, DRM is a general term.
I agree that making song files which will only play on certain players is way over the top. I’m talking about some way of restricting the amount of copies which can be made. I don’t think that would be unreasonable, seeing as the purchaser only has to pay for it once in the first place.
Because so many people in the music business (the ones who stand to lose!) are speaking out against copyright restrictions, there is becoming more and more a “free rein” attitude from some of the "buying" public. In fact it is now at the stage where some aren’t even paying in the first place – using software which converts streams into something you can save onto your PC as MP3 etc.
I’m sure that there are many artist who just aren’t making the living they should (or aren’t making it pay at all!) due to illegal copying. I can only see that situation becoming worse due to lack of restriction.
To cut to the chase... I personally would be happy if only the respectful, paying public got to hear my music and the thieves were excluded.
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