Selling Your Music Online

OK, you’ve spent your hard earned money putting together a recording of your band, you’ve had some copies pressed and now you are wondering how you are going to get rid of them to get your money back or even make a profit! Sure you can sell a few at gigs and a few to your friends, but how do you move more than just a few copies? Just because you aren’t signed to a record label doesn’t mean that you can’t sell your music online. The internet is a great way for the independent act to bypass to whole record company thing and put some money directly in their own pocket.

There are a variety of services available these days to allow independent artists and bands to sell their stuff. In this chapter we will look at some of the more popular methods of online music marketing.

Selling CD’s

First cab off the rank is CD Baby
CD Baby is a simple service that sets up a basic web page for you in their online store. You send them some CD’s and set your own price. When someone comes along that wants your CD, CD Baby handles the credit card processing and the postage. They take a $4US fee for this and pass the rest on to you. Simple!

Selling Digital Downloads

In this section 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.

Online Busking

The band Radiohead made all the news shows and papers this year after announcing they were going to release an album and let the fans decide how much, if anything, they would pay. It seems like a pretty brave move to let the customer have the product for free with no guarantee of any return but are you just setting yourself up to be ripped off?

“Online busking” is a term that’s been around for a little while but it’s usually associated with the smaller, more independent part of the industry. This was busking on a pretty grand scale! So how did they go?

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Full list of sections in this chapter:

  • Selling CD’s Online – CD Baby

    CD Baby is a simple service that sets up a basic web page for you in their online store. You send them some CD’s and set your own price. When someone comes along that wants your CD, CD Baby handles the credit card processing and the postage. They take a $4US fee for this and [...]

  • Selling Digital Downloads – Tunecore

    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 [...]

  • Online Busking – Radiohead

    The band Radiohead made all the news shows and papers this year after announcing they were going to release an album and let the fans decide how much, if anything, they would pay. It seems like a pretty brave move to let the customer have the product for free with no guarantee of any return [...]

  • TV, Film and Advertising – Pump Audio

    So far in my series on Selling Your Music Online we’ve looked at moving physical CD’s with CD Baby and selling digital downloads using Tunecore to get you into iTunes & others. In both of these cases we have been looking at selling our music to fans. Those people who listen to our music for [...]