Dear IMM: about CDBaby

No, from a consumer standpoint, CD Baby certainly does not suck. I've bought many CDs from it. xhuxk gets a lot of stuff of CD Baby, too. And one of my friends, a guy who runs a small record company in southeastern Pennsy sells CDs and digital downloads through it.

I was thinking of just using their digital distro service

we use cd baby for online ordering and digital distribution and i think it's a pretty great service. the best thing about it is how communicative they are, like how they tell when each step of the process has been completed, etc. the worst thing about it is the name ... embarassing

yeah but if I'm going to put out some old junk and call it SELECTED AMBIENT JERKS I + II i probably can't complain

My second band used it and it worked out okay.

I use their digital distro service for my label. For $55 and a total lack of legal and administrative hassle by the standards of digital distribution they have been excellent, I think. We just graduated to a co-distribution arrangement with a U.S. label so we won't be using them in future, and they have no relationship with Bleep so we had to get ourself on there, but they were no problem whatsoever for the ten releases we did with them and actually pretty good commission-wise compared to our new arrangement. Never used them for physical sales though.

so who all do they go through for digital distro? do you pick and choose who you want to host your stuff or do they shotgun it and emusic, bleep, itunes, amazon etc all get copies?

you pick and choose. you can restrict by service (itunes, etc.) or region. they can't get you on emusic for bleep though.

emusic or bleep

through cd baby we have made maybe $4 from sites other than itunes, btw. bleep has been our biggest source of revenue, but cd baby are not involved there. we'd still use cd baby if we just wanted to get on bleep as it's the most hassle-free way of getting a barcode and ISRCs while you're below a certain size.

CDBaby is good for digital, crappy for physical. Their pricing system is lame, they take $4 from every physical sale and charge the customer shipping on top of that. So if your CD is $8, the customer pays $10 and you get $4.

they charge for shipping? outrageous!

sez they partnered with emusic now. and last.fm.

LOL. Yeah, imagine, charging to get physical good to you. They mad.

Unintended hilarity aside, as said above, from a consumer standpoint, CD Baby's been great. Perfect for the music I like. And plenty of room on everyone's page for the making of it absolutely clear what the band's about along with hi and lo-bandwidth sampling.

The point is that I think they take more money than their service is worth for physical sales unless you're selling a whole lot of copies. Just take money with paypal and mail the shit yourself. Especially if you don't want to charge a lot.

You're doomed. Give up. LOL. CD Baby sux. Lay down and die, goodbye. That was the name of a tune on an Alice Cooper LP before they made any money. ROFL. Don the hair shirt. LOL. So funny, I shit myself.

I've racing stripes in my pants!

with emusic = interesting. I didn't realise that.

for physical sales there's a sweet spot of units/week where CD Baby makes sense. too few and you may as well do it yourself. too many and you should be with a proper distributor in shops (although the amount a proper distributor and the shop take is way more than $4).

Has anyone used watunes for digital distribution? It's $20 to get on itunes and others. I was thinking about doing it, because I am not interested in getting CDs pressed.

my band uses cdbaby and as far as i know it's worked out well for us (i'm not one of the leaders though, so i don't see the receipts). i do like that amongst all the crappy stuff on there there are some serious dudes too.

watunes looks acceptable but I don't like the idea of using FTP since I'm on DSL and my upload speeds are throttled to fuck. No way I'm moving 2GB of .wav files with transmit from my home box. I prefer to mail in the 44.1khz masters to cdbaby and have them deal with ripping it as per various' online merchants' standards.

I'm on DSL too, but it looks like you can mail them a CD as well.

Who's done this then? I'm not interested in their CD distribution service, I just want to make some stuff available on emusic/amazong/itunes etc.

haha I forgot I started this thread already. Thanks, new feature!

have you looked at tunecore?

Tom what label did/do you run?

I use their digital distro service for my label. For $55 and a total lack of legal and administrative hassle by the standards of digital distribution they have been excellent, I think. We just graduated to a co-distribution arrangement with a U.S. label so we won't be using them in future, and they have no relationship with Bleep so we had to get ourself on there, but they were no problem whatsoever for the ten releases we did with them and actually pretty good commission-wise compared to our new arrangement. Never used them for physical sales though.