CD Baby

[banjoboy]

Last May my bluegrass band released an album. We are a regional group and sell our albums off the stage after performances. One of our members would like to sell the album on CD Baby. Frankly, I'm not sure that it would even be worth the effort, for a couple reasons. As I mentioned, we are a regional band. I can't imagine that anyone would buy an album for a band that they've never heard about. Also, doesn't CD Baby take a pretty large cut from each CD sold? Do any of you have similar situations? Do you sell your CD on CD Baby? Has it been worth it?

[sbarnes]

i was interested in this questions too but no answers....

[Don Julin]

Banjoboy, I sell music on CD baby and for the most it is worth it. Don't just think of them selling your cd because they can do much more. They offer digital distribution through itunes and many other digital download services. Someone in a far away land may be searching itunes for bluegrass and come on to your recording and choose to download it. (for a fee of course) Cd baby sends you most of that money that is collected. This is money you had no chance of getting on your own. It has worked out well for me. Hope this helps.

[Ivan Kelsall]

Good,sound advice from Don Julin there. I'm purely a buyer of CD's, & i do buy from CD Baby as often as i can,because more of the cash goes to the performers. CD Baby also posts music clips on their site,so prospective buyers can sample the music prior to buying.That way, anybody can listen to your band,local or not,
Ivan

[yoshka]

I live overseas, and I have purchased music many times from CD Baby. I'm interested in supporting musicians and hearing new music. I started out buying CDs, but the postage rates have gone up so high recently that I started ordering downloads. As has been stated already, CD Baby has samples of your music for folks to "taste". If I'm looking for bluegrass, (what else?)I listen to the samples of the bands listed in the genre.
Yossi

[D C Blood]

CD Baby is a good thing...There is a one-time fee for putting your CD in their catalogue...For that they give you a web-site, put your songs in many different electronic sites, handle shipping...it's well worth the fee. We have our latest cd on there, and while we're not getting rich from it, it is sales we would never have had on our own. It's at least, a lot of gas money we wouldn't have had otherwise.

[Charlieshafer]

Cd Baby's a great way to go for all the reasons above. As a presenter, I rely on a lot of sources to find new faces to put on stage, and CD Baby is one of the best for trolling for talent. There are no drawbacks. Do NOT get sucked into the line of thinking that you're giving up profits. What you're giving up is a percentage of income that you would have never seen otherwise, which is what any intelligent businessman calls "advertising." ANY way that you can get the word out about your band is good. You may be regional now, but without growth you'll be in trouble long-term. New bands keep coming up creating more competition for a relatively fixed number of venues. Plus, most audience members like to see new stuff, so after a while, presenters will start looking for the "next new thing." Sure, you'll have a bunch of loyal fans, but they can buy only so many cd's, and after 20 of your shows, will maybe pass up the 21st to do something different.

Do the cd baby thing, and any other distribution thing you can think of. Most of your cd sales will be at concerts, but you need the other outlets, too. Most of all, GOOD LUCK AND GREAT SUCCESS!!

[Andy Miller]

I agree with all the positive commenters above. I get a trickle of CD sales and download sales, and availability & sales through a number of digital distributors, through CDBaby. It's a pretty low-effort way to advertise and sell a few.

The only thing that I've found I didn't like is that they only take five CD's at a time for inventory to start. So we experienced a couple of quick sellouts when our CD came out, rendering our product "out of stock" on their site until they got more in the mail, making me feel that we almost certainly missed some sales opportunities there. But I guess I'd gladly go to the post office every day if they kept selling at that rate. . . . which they didn't.

[fishdawg40]

I have a little branch to this discussion; do you need a bar code printed on your CD in order to sell it on CD Baby? I've heard you need one to sell it at the local CD store.

[DeamhanFola]

Speaking only as a consumer, I love CDBaby: it's how I found 2 of the bands that are now my favourites (The Builders and the Butchers/ Brown Bird). I love that they're all indie groups and that you can do interesting searches ("Brooding" as a category, etc.). A real antidote to the #### out there on today's commercial airwaves.

With regard to the OP's question, I'm living testimony of someone who found several groups' disks through it (and have now bought all their available music).

[mandopete]

Kent,

Another vote of reccomendation for CD Baby. They provide great customer service and you folks should definately have your CD available there. Think of it this way - when I play Runaway Train on Bluegrass Ramble I will sometimes get a call from a listener saying, "Hey I really dig that Tabscott fellow*, where can I get the CD?"



Not having a CD available for online purchase is one of the biggest mistakes I see by regional bands like us. Using CD Baby makes it easy for you to have a link right on your website for people who like to buy online.


* No accounting for taste

[Ronnie L]

I have bought some great music from CD baby. I live in the UK so im browsing and buying cd's that would just be impossible to obtain any other way. Also they offer a jewel case free postage which drops the postage rate down quite a bit...

[steve V. johnson]

Banjoboy, my two bands (see sig) haven't traveled far nor did we expect to strike out for the Big Time, but we wanted a central point for folks to find out CDs and information about us. We discovered that when we play local/regional shows, there are folks who might just wander by and smile and later think, 'Hey, that band was pretty fun...' and come looking for us. CDBaby has been tremendous, a perfect tool for us.

Bar code... As I understand, it happens in two ways: 1) The product can have it's own unique and trackable bar code via registry with the UPC (Universal Products Commission? I don't remember exactly, but you can find it online), and for folks who are serious about "moving units" and building the business, this is really good. Commercial tracking services like SoundScan can tell you where the stuff is all the time, and where it's selling and not, things that radio, concert promoters and such really need; 2) The companies who manufacture CDs buy huge lists of barcode listings and will assign you one when you have your CDs made. They have templates of the barcode graphic that your artist can just paste onto your CD pkg and you're good to go. Some years back, these numbers from the list used to have a little less trackability than the ones one could get directly from the UPC, but I expect that that's changed and that now they're all the same.

When we started in this ('03), many sales outlets wouldn't accept a product unless it had a UPC code that they could use for their own inventory work. Amazon.com was a good example. They had pages and pages of forms to be filled out before they'd consider stocking (our) CDs, so we just blew it off. Some months after we put our stuff up on CDBaby, a friend looked for us on Amazon.com and WOW, there we were! It was hilarious, tho... it was obvious that Amazon would order it from CDBaby and trans-ship it to the customer. Ordered from Amazon, our CD cost $38 + shipping!!! Amazon never sold any... LOL But, when our digital distribution was in place, folks did order downloads via Amazon, at the usual sort of prices. So all that ended well.

CDBaby has a bunch of tools that folks can use for promotion, for those who want to really dynamically push their bands, grow audiences and 'move product,' and for the rest of us, they let us do what we do with no interference. The accounting is great, the cost is insignificant. Our costs for our CDs' production were low, we pretty much kicked in for the manufacturing and we did all the rest ourselves, so when I say that CDBaby's costs are insignificant, that's not relative to a five-figure-before-the-decimal amount. Our CDs have paid their costs in under a year.

In some cases, we've used emails along with the CDBaby product addresss, to promote our shows and we've found that folks do network via CDBaby, indirectly, and even in the simple, primitive ways we used that, it has helped get folks to some of our shows.

We signed up for digital distribution and we've been happily surprised at the numbers of albums and songs folks have downloaded. Had we tried to serve, by ourselves, all the digital distribution outlets we're in now via CDBaby, we'd have gone flat nuts, or more likely, just given up and quit.
It's great fun to get an email from Japan, Indonesia, France, wherever, where someone got the music and likes it and wants to talk about it.

And then the final bit... We've made good friends via CDBaby, in both usual and unusual ways, and that's been the best.

When we signed with CDBaby it was run by its founder Derek Sivers, who recently sold the company to DiskMakers. Derek writes a good and wide-ranging blog about music, performance and promotion, growing bands and businesses, reaching audiences, all that. The change-over to new admin at CDBaby wasn't without some 'growing pains,' but there's a new look and new tools, and it seems better. There's no real change in how -we- are dealt with, it's all good, and there seems to be more for more ambitious folks to use, but that hasn't ruined it at all for those of us who aren't aiming at stardom, just making music & recordings for the rest of our lives.

I hope this helps.

stv

[Gary S]

I am working on a recoding project and have also been wondering about cdbaby. One of my concerns about downloading songs is that consumers often cherry pick individual songs to buy and never experience the entire cd.

[Charlieshafer]

Think big picture. If people get introduced to you through a song or two, they may end up buying the cd, or at least telling other folks about your music. For the average consumer, shelling out for a whole cd on an untried artists will spook most all away. Plus, it's how the business is done now, so might as well get used to it. In the very near future, many downloads will come straight from the labels, with full resolution (meaning huge) files, that will be essentially the same as listening to the master tapes in your home. This won't come cheap, so many will buy just songs. For a quick look at how that's done, go to the Nonesuch label site. Here, you download the hi-res files, which are master-tape in quality, and they sell you hard copy as a back-up. These are compressed to fit on a cd. Full-res files won;t fit on one cd. It's a brave new world, so jump on in...

[steve V. johnson]

Gary S., yeah, we thought about that with the Lopers. The Culchies Irish trad stuff is, well... trad... so we didn't really design the flow of the album the same way we did with the original material on the Lopers' CDs.

But as Charlie sez, it's a good thing. We've sold a real good amount of single downloads and it has resulted in folks coming back for more.

And I'd rather sell one or two tunes than none, too.

stv

[Gary S]

What you all are saying makes sense. It is natural for an artist to want the work to be listened to in it's entirety. There is also an intentional order of the tunes. But as you say, this is how things are now done. There are many advantages and some disadvantages as in most things. Thanks for the responses...Gary