Where Indie Artists Get Everything

anonicon writes "From the same people who brought you the Web's first corrupt CDs tracking list comes the first site where independent musicians receive 100% of the money that fans pay for their music or merchandise (of course, after the credit card company takes their cut from the payment). More information can be had here or here."

Love that Math

[spoonist]

Obligatory link to an article by Courtney Love:

Courtney Love does the math [salon.com]

The final score?

Band: $0.00

Record Label: $6,600,000.00

After the "revolution" is over

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't you think that this wonderful concept should have a few artists to start with --- exactly whom is participating in this revolution? They should have prominence on this site -- the "founding fathers" as it were.

I want my old mtv! (where they played MUSIC videos)

Let's here it for FatChuck

[The Tyro]

Good idea... no artists yet though (at least in the half-dozen genres that I checked).

That site has been great... particularly for finding crippled/broken CDs BEFORE you buy the stinkin things. I'm a fan, primarily because I don't own a regular CD player... but I own four computers with CDROM drives.

Well done, charles... well done.

A nice idea, but...

[geekwench]

...somebody seems to have forgotten to get the word out to the artists. To paraphrase Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park: "You will eventually have CDs on your CD sales website, right?"

In all seriousness, I think that it's a really good idea, if they can pull it off. The problems with signing to a major label are covered nicely in an article that can be found here {http://www.arancidamoeba.com/mrr/problemwithmusic .html), and trying to market your music by yourself can be an exercise in utter futility. There's both safety and promotion capital in numbers.
Here's hoping... *crosses fingers*

fatchunks blows fat chunks

[zach_smith]

This service doesn't add much to what's already out there. You have to pay them $60 for the first year, just to get a subdomain listing that shows your CDs, links to your website, and lets people order your stuff. Then, if somebody does order something, you get an email and have to process the order and send it out. The only thing they do is handle the monetary transaction.

How is this any better than musicians setting up their own site and using paypal (which takes out a lower percentage for credit card charges)?

This doesn't seem like a revolution, just a way to make money off wannabe musicians that think they might sell something.

Re:Europeans

[anarxia]

Could it be that the site is European (judging from the flags on the page) and so they have better access to information about European CDs?

Re:fatchunks blows fat chunks

[Oscar_Wilde]

Good point but a site like this gives a nice central location where consumers can find music they want. If everyone has their own sites then you'll never be able to locate them (think about it, Google ranks sites based on how many other sites link to them and if your obscure that wont be many). Also a central site can maintain an independent chart system record other users recommendations, etc, in an independent fashion. A personal site or a site belonging to a major label cant really claim the same. Places like amazon.com might be somewhat impartial but they only want to carry items from major labels (things that are obscure wont make them lots of money quickly).

Re:Good on 'em

[26199]

One slight problem: follow the link and you'll find there aren't actually any artists signed up to buy from.

Re:fatchunks blows fat chunks

[CynicTheHedgehog]

What they need to do is:

1. Offer (optional) CD creation services at various levels: CD with generic label, CD with custom label, and CD with custom label and insert (album art and lyrics)

2. Publish web services for publishing and consuming orders. That way you could set up partner services for promotions, and bands could automate CD printing and delivery if they opt not to pay for the CD creation services.

With those two things this would be a very powerful service.

100%?

[91degrees]

Surely the bands have costs of their own. They have to spend money on marketing, recording, persuading radio stations to play the music. Stuff like that. A record contract bundles this al up into one packages (and then overcharges horrendously - that's monopolies for you), but if you don;t use a record comapny, how will people know to buy your music?

Re:Love that Math

[LinuxHam]

Obligatory link to the Steve Albini article she ripped it from.

The Problem with Music [petdance.com]

She once tried to slap David Gedge of The Wedding Present backstage because she heard he was friends with Albini.

EMusic rules

[Chazmati]

Your sig mentions EMusic. I listen to a lot of jazz. For the price of a CD every month, I get unlimited *legal* MP3 downloads of classic stuff. Bought a Penguin guide to jazz on CD to help sort through EMusic's collection, and have pulled maybe 11G of tunes in three months (and I haven't been hitting it that hard). It's practically more than one can listen to.

I guess it's a product life-cycle thing. Relatively few people are buying classic jazz these days (compared to top 40/pop/alternative), so the record labels are figuring they'll take what they can get for it.

Re:Not exactly a new idea

[An El Haqq]

Last I heard, CDBaby takes $4 per CD [cdbaby.net]. Of course, they handle warehousing and shipping for you, but then you have to pay to send the CDs to them. For most sales, they also add the standard handling fees that the musician won't see.

So, you could sell your CD for $14 + $2.25 shipping and make $10, or you could sell your CD for $14 + $2.25 and make $15+ before shipping costs. Or, you could sell your CD for $10 + $2 shipping, get about $10 and maybe sell more because of the cheaper price.

As for marketing, you're absolutely right. Labels also take care of weeding the wheat from the chaff (in their opinion), something that indie sales and promotion sites generally don't do (Think of MP3.com [mp3.com]). I gather that most musicians want the first problem solved w/o consideration for the second--something that just isn't economically feasible. So for now, you settle for word-of-mouth and hope that sites like CDBaby and FatChuck's Music help you extend the loudness of the mouth.

Re:fatchunks blows fat chunks

[anonicon]

Hi Zach, let's take this from the top.

That $60 is to pay for your Internet merchant account (I actually make $20/account for year 1) so that you can accept credit card orders from anyone in the world - not just the limited number of countries that paypal supports (I believe it's 37 compared to the 200+ countries you get with your merchant account).

As far as getting the email and processing it, well, you can pay to ship all of your CDs to someone who will distribute it for you and they will A) keep $3-4 per CD, and B) the shipping. I worked on this so that finally artists could keep *everything* and not have to deal with more middlemen.

Also, artists *can* use the links we've created to their CDs/other stuff and put it on their own site. The benefit here is that A) their sites aren't generally getting listed on Slashdot or other popular news sources, B) *many* bands don't have web sites or they have poorly designed full-Flash ones that aren't friendly to anyone running *cough*Linux*BSD*cough*. Their sub-domain site is so that they can easily promote themselves and not have to worry about whether they've got the people, time or skills for setting up a competent web site.

To be blunt, why are you so cynical? The last thing I want to do is make money off of "wannabe musicians" - I'm trying really hard to help the indies who are busting their ass to make a living with their music. Sorry if this idea pissed you off.

Peace.

ignore music in the vault!

[rjnagle]

more [opsound.org] about creative commons music [creativecommons.org]. Opsound is a site that puts music into the public domain and properly tags them as such. The backlash from the Verizon decision [slashdot.org] is probably going to kill the music industry, as "free-to-distribute" music gains more cachet.

Actually, because of the Verizon case, I have decided to boycott all commercially recorded music which forbid the rights to free distribution. By boycott, I don't merely mean "refusing to buy" CD's. I mean refusing even to listen or download such music (even illegally). Yes, that probably means that I will no longer listen to Philip Glass, Suzanne Vega, etc. Once they wise up and liberalize their licenses, I might consider listening to them again. And I might also consider checking their CD's out of the library (whenever I feel a pang of nostalgia, in the same way that a Russian might for a moment miss a gulag's watery soup).

The restrictive licenses of music companies essentially lock commercial music in the vault. I'm not interested in picking locks anymore just for a momentary glimpse at these so-called "precious" flowers. I'm interested in enjoying what is free out in the free air. Let all those "precious" flowers in the vault lose their color, rot away and turn into crap. Good riddance.

We as creative artists need to wean ourselves from this enslavement that we call "copyright enforcement." The people and companies who benefit by starving artists, drafting exploitative contracts and preventing works of art from being distributed freely deserve nothing less than our contempt.

You may say: how could I survive without vault music? Simple. If the music rots away in the vault, it was already dead to begin with. Who wants to keep dead flowers around? Instead of locking flowers in the vault, it is better to appreciate them in the open where it's easy to pick and admire. We are like bees admiring the flowers all around us, flitting about, taking what we need and moving on (and propagating the beauty of what we see at the same time). Flowers look pretty among other flowers, not inside some ugly dirty vault guarded by lawyers with vulture-like beaks. As the public areas become more covered with flowers, the desire to possess the rotting heaps in the vault will seem more bizzare, less relevant. The best way to increase the number of flowers in this world is to open the gardens up to bees. Anyway, it is folly to think that a group of lawyers (and that is essentially what a music company is ) owns a song or a human voice or an image. The copyright to Beauty is owned by one person, and that is God. His lawyers are ruthless and know the law of nature backwards and forwards. The license they enforce allows infinite creation and multiplication, but banishes those who say beauty belongs to one.

Freeing myself from the music of the vault provides an opportunity to learn about artists with more enlightened views toward distribution. I plan to patronize them in many ways, including donations. Also, I plan to attend more concerts and still pay for my commercial-free Internet radio ($5 a month) until decent creative commons radio stations [sourceforge.net] emerge. It doesn't mean that I am opposed to paying money for music per se. But when I pay for music, I want either to have free distribution rights and/or the certainty that the artist is receiving at least 50% of the money I am paying. What do artists for major labels now receive? 1%?

Actually lawyers are not completely the culprit here. It would be a trivial matter for lawyers on either the artist's or industry's side to draft a limited duration copyright. All ownership rights could expire after about 5 or 10 years. Artists are partially to blame for not insis