Best resources for selling your music on-line

[GuitarPhan]

I'd love to hear anyone's thoughts on their good/bad experiences with making their original music available for sale on-line. iTunes, CDBaby, I know there are a number of ways. Not looking to get rich (and I won't!) but I do want to put some original stuff available soon and make it easy to buy, download and get paid for... Gracias.

[Xtremca]

Originally Posted by GuitarPhan

I'd love to hear anyone's thoughts on their good/bad experiences with making their original music available for sale on-line. iTunes, CDBaby, I know there are a number of ways. Not looking to get rich (and I won't!) but I do want to put some original stuff available soon and make it easy to buy, download and get paid for... Gracias.

A buddy of mine uses Tunecore. I've also purchased music from Loudr. I've never sold any music, so I cannot recommend one personally. Just wanted to throw out a couple of other sites that I knew of.

Chris

[Ty Ford]

I like CD Baby because they distribute to a lot of others and because they don't post your whole song. These days, it's just too easy to grab a stream and not pay for it.

If it goes through CD Baby, they also truncate the feeds to the vendors.

You can put up singles of 10 minutes or less and they are very phone friendly.

My first piece for CD Baby is actually a spoken word piece. If you need a good reading of the Declaration of Independence for your July 4th celebration, here you go…

http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/tyford
Regards,

Ty Ford

[MikeBmusic]

CDBaby and Tunecore will give you the most bang-for-the-buck.

On the other hand, if you want to do it at no cost, bandcamp offers downloads in lossless formats, not just MP3, and you can set our own prices and they only charge you a 10% fee after 10 sales (or something like that).
For hard copy sales, Kunaki is the cheapest for duplication (CD-R) print-on-demand sales, and Amazon offers CreateSpace with CD-R print-on-demand and MP3 downloads, too.

[Doug Young]

Bandcamp basically takes every 10th sale - so if you never sell 10, it's free :-). It's a pretty cool setup, easy to do, and you can customize it to integrate with your site. On my site, you can just browse tabs, and when you click on the "store" page, you're actually on bandcamp, tho unless you look close, you won't know. I have my CDs setup to allow up to 96K/24 bit as downloads, so you can hear it as it was recorded. You can also include other stuff in the download - so for example, I include all the tab with one cd, as a book. All in all, it's a pretty nice service! I use CD Baby, too, but they won't let me include other stuff in downloads. But they do make distribution to lots of places easy.

[GuitarPhan]

Thanks very much, all. I do like the idea of services that allow parts of songs to be heard, not entire songs. I'll take a look. Which of these do you think are easiest to "seamlessly" link to from your own website? Any other info is very welcome. thanks again.

[Tarekith]

Bandcamp is the easiest to set up and how I make the most money on my songs. I also use cdbaby for bigger releases,its good to have stuff on the iTunes and amazon stores for promotional reasons. I like cd baby because once you pay their fees to get it aggregated, that's it, you're done. Some sites like Reverbnation require a yearly fee to get your songs relisted.

[GuitarPhan]

Thanks again, all -- are there any thoughts on which way to go here if I just have, say, 6-8 songs to put up, offering them separately? If I do 8 or more, I suppose I can call it a CD and sell it as a unit -- either instead of or in addition to the individual tunes. Maybe the separates are $1.99 and the CD is $9.99 or something like that.
Also, if you sell on one platform, can you also sell on another? Any reason I wouldn't want to be on iTunes, CDBaby, TuneCore AND Bandcamp? Kinda redundant, I know....

[MikeBmusic]

Tunecore and CDBaby will get you on other sites like iTunes as a part of the package, check for all the details before playing for duplicated efforts.