Hopefully lots of people!

I'm planning to manage sales of my album (releasing end of october) via Bandcamp, but have recently been in contact with the director of Aurovine, UK, who are a little bit cheaper and carry the benefit of being in the UK.

I'm ready to be persuaded either way: what are Bandcamp's facebook integration and mobile site really like to use, and do they make selling easier?

Is it worth the extra 1-3% fee and dealing with a US company?

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Composer;
www.ogonline.org

You can do both, neither are exclusive. Both are great (as long as you don't mind the fact that people can stream your whole album). They each have equally easy setups and work just fine.

Bandcamp is much bigger and more people will be browsing it. On the other hand you will be a needle in a haystack. On Aurovine you will stand out more -- you might even get some prominence -- but because it's new not as many people will be checking it out. But neither will bring you sales that aren't mostly driven by people already knowing of you and already seeking you out, any more than iTunes does.

I take it that you are aware that you can now sell your CDs via both these places as well, although you have to also offer downloads as well as part of a CD sale.

As for the slight difference in percentage, unless you're selling bucketloads of albums -- which you won't be, right? -- it's not worth worrying about that much.

Edited by Scramble (10/09/12 08:00 AM)

I guess you're right, I could just do both and more. Blanket platform presence makes sense.

I've never done this before so I don't know how difficult to manage it is.

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Composer;
www.ogonline.org

If you want people to find your music, you definitely need to be on iTunes first and foremost. Then people who find you on there, who want lossless audio, would normally seek out out on Bandcamp. DEFINITELY worth it to be on both.

Kerry

Bandcamp is one of the most user-friendly sites for bands and public alike that I've come across. Their rates are fair enough, compared to a physical distributor, and you can also sell CDs and merchandise.

You don't really have to 'deal with' them, it's all pretty automatic, and the money goes straight into your Paypal account. Having said that, if you ask them a question, or suggest something on their blog, they get back to you pretty quickly, and are always helpful.

If you want to be on iTunes you can do that through a few places, eg. CD Baby, TuneCore, ReverbNation.

Quote oggyb:

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I guess you're right, I could just do both and more. Blanket platform presence makes sense.

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yes, as long as you don't have to sign up individually for all those platforms, there must be dozens of 'em!

Fortunately someone like CD baby will get your stuff on iTunes and a myriad of other download places in return for one sign up excercise.

Maybe the ideal would be to go via CD baby for the benefit of 'saturation' and also Bandcamp to actually use as their UK based service, but I'm not sure whether they're mutually exclusive (because the offer similar services?) maybe someone else can advise if that would be possible or of any benefit?

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>Maybe the ideal would be to go via CD baby for the benefit of 'saturation' and also Bandcamp to actually use as their UK based service, but I'm not sure whether they're mutually exclusive (because the offer similar services?)

Not quite sure what you're saying here, but there's no problem with using both CD Baby and Bandcamp -- they're both non-exclusive.

(The only thing you don't want to do is to use two digital distributors to get your music onto, say, iTunes, as then iTunes won't know who it should be dealing with).

We use Bandcamp and Tunecore together. The service from both of these businesses has been excellent.

One point though, these places are *only* shops so you need to think about marketing and promotion separately if you haven't already built a fan-base. I've met quite a few people who seem to think that by getting your music on iTunes (and Amazon, Bandcamp etc) it will somehow magically start to sell just because it is there. This is definitely not the case.

Back to the original question: I absolutely love Bandcamp. Their systems are amazingly artist friendly, such as giving you the email addresses of all your customers, up to the minute sales stats, the flexibility to alter songs after they've been released, control your own page artwork, a fanastic support desk, etc. etc.. I highly recommend them.

Best wishes,

--------------------
Have a look and listen to our music:
TobesMusic.com

Quote oggyb:

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Hopefully lots of people!

I'm planning to manage sales of my album (releasing end of october) via Bandcamp, but have recently been in contact with the director of Aurovine, UK, who are a little bit cheaper and carry the benefit of being in the UK.

I'm ready to be persuaded either way: what are Bandcamp's facebook integration and mobile site really like to use, and do they make selling easier?

Is it worth the extra 1-3% fee and dealing with a US company?

---

Only Beatport or iTunes sell music in any quantity. Other sites are just messing around really, for the amount of revenue you will make from it.

If you're going to use an aggregator to access multiple platforms at once (iTunes and Amazon being the biggest) your best bet is to go with one that doesn't take a percentage of your sales, the way that CDBaby does. Think long-term here: if you're lucky enough to eventually be making $1000/month -- or even $500/month -- from iTunes etc, do you really want a company like CD Baby to be taking 20% of your earnings?

The other thing to be mindful of is that once you pick an aggregator, you need to stick with that aggregator. If you tire of CDBaby and want to switch to another aggregator, iTunes (literally) turns off the lights on your albums & when they get turned back on by the other distributor, you are starting from zero: all of your reviews and ratings for that album are wiped out, as are all of the iTunes Genius stats that you've accumulated. These stats are the drivers of the "users who bought this also bought this" recommendations, a la Amazon's recommendations. So if you become an iTunes success story where you're making some decent $$ after a year or two or three, and you suddenly decide that "hey wait, I don't want CDBaby to keep taking 20% of my earnings, because I'd rather just pay a flat fee of $19.95 a year to an aggregator" you are stuck: if you leave your aggregator, your albums get reset to square one.

Dittomusic offers a really great low-fee package for iTunes & some of the major platforms, and if you want to add on platforms above and beyond that, it's do-able. THey don't take a percentage of your income either: so after Apple takes 29 cents of that 99-cent download, and you're left with 70 cents, they pass on the full 70 cents to you.

While the 20% cut that CDBaby & some other aggregators may not seem like much upfront, if you start to make good money a little ways down the road, that money will add up. If you're making $500/month from iTunes ($6000/year) and CDBaby takes 20%, that's $1200 per year. And when you look at it in that context, suddenly paying $19.95/year to host an album is a real bargain.

Explore your options: there are many out there!

Kerry

I've never heard of Beatport or some of the other platforms mentioned.

That's an interesting point, Kerry, thanks. We won't be using iTunes straight away, but it is something we are considering due to people asking "will it be on iTunes?"

Thanks for the advice everyone, we've got ~240 pre-orders and an audience of 750K with inbuilt momentum, so it's very valuable to me to have these options to consider.

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Composer;
www.ogonline.org

If you have that big of an audience already, you absolutely MUST be on iTunes. MUST MUST MUST MUST MUST. Seriously. It's the largest music store in the world for a reason! It's the first place people go when looking for music.

Kerry

I've found bandcamp far more worthwhile than CD Baby/iTune etc. Most folks seem very hung up on the fact CD baby etc. don't even distribute at CD quality. Bandcamp also lets you add bonus tracks, extra artwork and so on and the pro option lets you cut down on full-track streaming, which is its only weakness IMHO.

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http://www.bogusfocus.com/

Quote KMuzzey:

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While the 20% cut that CDBaby & some other aggregators may not seem like much upfront, if you start to make good money a little ways down the road, that money will add up. If you're making $500/month from iTunes ($6000/year) and CDBaby takes 20%, that's $1200 per year. And when you look at it in that context, suddenly paying $19.95/year to host an album is a real bargain.

---

Very true and I agree you have to think about that, but...
Would an artist at that level where they could sell in those kind of volumes (ie way beyond most independent musicians) be looking to use CD baby anyway?

My perception is that CD Baby's more aimed at those independents selling in the region of a coupla thousand CD runs tops? No doubt there are exceptions, but in general.

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Quote KMuzzey:

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Dittomusic offers a really great low-fee package for iTunes & some of the major platforms, and if you want to add on platforms above and beyond that, it's do-able. THey don't take a percentage of your income either: so after Apple takes 29 cents of that 99-cent download, and you're left with 70 cents, they pass on the full 70 cents to you.

Kerry

---

Thanks for this ! Just had a look at Dittomusic, VERY impressed....

Quote KMuzzey:

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If you're going to use an aggregator to access multiple platforms at once (iTunes and Amazon being the biggest) your best bet is to go with one that doesn't take a percentage of your sales, the way that CDBaby does. ........Dittomusic offers a really great low-fee package for iTunes & some of the major platforms

---

It depends on how much you sell.
Like many SoS readers, I am curating a back catalogue from about 20 years of music making in various moderately unsuccessful unsigned bands This amounts to a couple of hundred tracks, but only a dozen or so sales per year. I want this music to be available to the rest of the human race, call it vanity publishing if you like - but I model where I have to pay an annual renewal fee to keep the catalogue in stores is hopeless... it would cost me a fortune.
Therefore, the model where it's more-or-less free up front, but they take a chunk of sales suits me much better.
(I actually use Kjer.com, a Danish agent for The Orchard/IODA - you pay an annual blanket fee that allows you to upload as much as you like, and no renewals necessary to keep it up once it's there... and then they take a cut of earnings)

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~~~ A weasel hath not such a deal of spleen as you are tossed with! www.feline1.co.uk ~~~

Quote feline1:

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Quote KMuzzey:

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If you're going to use an aggregator to access multiple platforms at once (iTunes and Amazon being the biggest) your best bet is to go with one that doesn't take a percentage of your sales, the way that CDBaby does. ........Dittomusic offers a really great low-fee package for iTunes & some of the major platforms

---

It depends on how much you sell.
Like many SoS readers, I am curating a back catalogue from about 20 years of music making in various moderately unsuccessful unsigned bands This amounts to a couple of hundred tracks, but only a dozen or so sales per year.

---

I totally get that line of thinking. But what I would love for people to consider, when undertaking digital distribution of their work, is the potential and the possibility: if the music does as well as one hopes it does, your sales will grow over time. It's reasonable to assume that one who enters the digital distribution arena does so with the hopes that they will do well, and eventually make some money from it - I don't know anyone who enters that arena thinking "I'm going to do this because it's probably going to fail, so before I undertake it I want to minimize the financial impact on me."

iTunes sales will grow over the first year or two. And once the iTunes Genius kicks in and starts recommending your music to listeners with similar tastes, your sales will increase further. The hoped-for outcome for most musicians/composers is that a year or two from now, you might start seeing some surprising figures hitting your iTunes account. If you're doing even a modicum of promotion or social media, this outcome is more likely than unlikely. And the day might come, 2 years from now, where you're pulling in a couple hundred $ a month from iTunes downloads - and then you'll suddenly realize that you're losing 20% of those sales to an aggregator, and you may find yourself wishing you were just paying a simple $19.95 per year fee to an aggregator, vs. the setup fee & commission that a distrib like CDBaby takes. And then you'll suddenly decide "It is now worth it for me to switch aggregators and just pay someone a flat $19.95/year hosting fee for this album" -- but at that point, you can't switch aggregators without there being some dire consequences. Part of the success you will see 2 years from now will be due to 1) good reviews on your album 2) good star ratings on your album 3) iTunes Genius statistics, which look at a user's library data and then based on that data, recommend to them "you might also like _____ album." If you switch aggregators, that data is deleted and zero'd out entirely and you are back at square one. Your album's data does not stick to your album if you switch aggregators: it gets deleted. When your album reposts under the new aggregator's distribution, it starts at square one: zero. Blank page. No reviews, no ratings, no previously-purchased stats from users. So think of digital distribution in 2 pieces: 1) where can people best and most easily find you and 2) once they've found you, are you giving them all of the available purchasing options. Someone is more likely to find you on iTunes than on Bandcamp: but if they're an audiophile, they're going to look to Bandcamp next to see if you offer lossless options. Your thinking shouldn't be "iTunes or Bandcamp?" it should be "iTunes AND ......"

So I say all of this to encourage musicians and composers to look at the long run, not the 30-days-from-now picture. If you're considering digital distribution and the potential that that holds, then perhaps it's worth it to part with the paltry sum of $19.95/year or $9.95/month or whatever it is, because it's not a lot of money, and hopefully a year or two or three down the road, it will be of no consequence. If you want to spend less on digital distribution for 1 year than you would on going out to dinner on a Friday night, welllll..... perhaps it's time for a re-think.

Re: Tunecore, I believe they used to be a 9.95 or 19.95/year fee, then suddenly jacked their rates up to the current structure of $49.95 per year PER ALBUM. And they essentially had a user base that was trapped, because if they switched aggregators, they would lose all of their reviews, ratings, and iTunes Genius stats and buyer data. There are much better deals out there to be had, so do your best to think long-term and find something that you're willing to live with on a long-term basis.

Kerry

Quote GlynB:

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Very true and I agree you have to think about that, but...
Would an artist at that level where they could sell in those kind of volumes (ie way beyond most independent musicians) be looking to use CD baby anyway?

My perception is that CD Baby's more aimed at those independents selling in the region of a coupla thousand CD runs tops? No doubt there are exceptions, but in general.

---

CDBaby is aimed at anyone selling anything, in any volume at all. They make money with a setup fee per album, per store or per tier, so even if you sell 0 albums, you're still paying them something. Then each album you sell provides them with a commission on top of their setup fees. And I'm not sure if they charge an annual hosting fee or not, honestly.

Example: for a $9.99 album on iTunes, you will receive $7.00 (iTunes takes 2.99). If you sell 10 albums in 1 month on iTunes, you make $70. If you use CDBaby or a service that takes a 20% cut, instead of $70 you then get $56 (in addition to the upfront signup fee that you've already paid, and whatever hosting fees they charge). Now imagine that you're a band doing gigs, and maybe you sell 100 of those 9.99 iTunes albums in 1 month: that's $700. Or, if your aggregator takes 20%, that instead is only $560. OR.... say you sell only 10 albums per month on iTunes ($70/month in your pocket): that's $840 per year in your pocket -- but after that CDBaby 20% commission, that's only $672.

So if you're only selling 10 albums per month, and thereby making $840 per year on iTunes sales, isn't it still worth it to pay a simple $19.95/year hosting fee and keep 100% of the royalties that iTunes/Amazon/Spotify/etc pass on to you? I understand that times are tight for everyone, but really, $19.95 (which I guess is about 13GBP) is the cost of 2 drinks at a bar. Or it's your half of the check if you order pizza and beer with a friend.

If you really truly believe that you will never ever in a million years sell more than 10 copies of your album, then why would you even enter the digital distribution arena in the first place? Probably best to just give it away then, right?

Think long term, not short term. Weigh your options and your costs with distributors. Choose wisely, knowing that once you've chosen, you can't really leave.

Kerry

> And I'm not sure if they charge an annual hosting fee or not, honestly.

CD Baby doesn't charge an annual hosting fee.

I had been thinking of switching aggregators for the reasons Kerry mentions. Think I might do it now. But I don't know who to try. Ditto looks a bit amateurish to me -- there are spelling mistakes on their web page, overlapping text, and some of their links don't work.

The bottom line is you have to work out whether it's worth it financially to pay $20 every year, for ever, to have your album up for sale at all the top online retailers. That will entirely depend on how well you think your output will do (in terms of sales) in the long term.

Depending on what level of the business you're at, you can see it as a gamble...IF something you did really took off (the 'lucky break') then you'd be better off with the flat fee per annum approach. if you think there might be times where your product sell hardly anything, then you might be better off with the one-off fee (costs nothing in subsequent years remember even if you sell zilch) and then a percentage approach.

If you end up with say 5 albums out there that's potentially $100 every year just to list your back catalogue.

There's the option to switch method if sales either tail off, or sales take off.

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Quote KMuzzey:

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It depends on how much you sell.
Like many SoS readers, I am curating a back catalogue from about 20 years of music making in various moderately unsuccessful unsigned bands This amounts to a couple of hundred tracks, but only a dozen or so sales per year.

---

I totally get that line of thinking. But what I would love for people to consider, when undertaking digital distribution of their work, is the potential and the possibility: if the music does as well as one hopes it does, your sales will grow over time. It's reasonable to assume that one who enters the digital distribution arena does so with the hopes that they will do well, and eventually make some money from it - I don't know anyone who enters that arena thinking "I'm going to do this because it's probably going to fail, so before I undertake it I want to minimize the financial impact on me."

---

Sure, but I'm talking about a half a dozen bands and projects which already *did* "fail" ... they've long since split up, they're not gigging, they're not being promoted... so expecting them to suddenly be bought by thousands of people all at once it a rather unlikely possibility!

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~~~ A weasel hath not such a deal of spleen as you are tossed with! www.feline1.co.uk ~~~

Quote feline1:

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Sure, but I'm talking about a half a dozen bands and projects which already *did* "fail" ... they've long since split up, they're not gigging, they're not being promoted... so expecting them to suddenly be bought by thousands of people all at once it a rather unlikely possibility!

---

Then it sounds like a per-album commission might be the best way to go. But realize that if people *do* start buying this music and you suddenly want to switch distributors, you lose any momentum you've gained within iTunes. And if they've already failed, and you don't think they will succeed -- at least, not be successful enough to warrant a $20/year investment in keeping the albums out there on digital platforms -- can I ask why you're releasing them to begin with? I don't mean that to sound snarky, it just sounds like you're entering the arena with the assumption that these efforts have already failed, so you're just going to put them out there... to prove that they failed? Or to see them fail again? It all sounds a bit fatalistic.

Kerry
Kerry

Any serious artist would want their work to be available - pointless otherwise. It is not fatalistic, i'd say, to make ones work available. Just good artistic common sense really.

So who's a good distributor then, if CD Baby takes too big a percentage, and Tunecore charges too much, and Ditto are too amateurish?

Quote Airfix:

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Any serious artist would want their work to be available - pointless otherwise. It is not fatalistic, i'd say, to make ones work available. Just good artistic common sense really.

---

I agree: your work should be available. But I was questioning why someone would be releasing something, as it seems the earlier poster was, while saying "it already failed once, so chances are I won't sell any albums anyway" -- that's the fatalistic part. If you're going to release your work on digital platforms, at least enter the arena with a smile on your face! vs. a shrug while saying "oh well, it probably won't work anyway."

Kerry

Quote oggyb:

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Hopefully lots of people!

I'm planning to manage sales of my album (releasing end of october) via Bandcamp, but have recently been in contact with the director of Aurovine, UK, who are a little bit cheaper and carry the benefit of being in the UK.

I'm ready to be persuaded either way: what are Bandcamp's facebook integration and mobile site really like to use, and do they make selling easier?

Is it worth the extra 1-3% fee and dealing with a US company?

---

Is this in addition to your own website??

If you already have a bunch of presales why not just use your own site or make your own site for that group?? Then you can integrate everything with that while pushing all your traffic to your site first, instead of the other way around. With an audience of 750k already in place i wouldn't want to send them anywhere other then my own site...

General assumption here but saying 240 albums at $9.99, 15% of that is like $350, good enough to get a pretty nice site built if you don't want to do it on your own, plus you'll have good traffic stats...

Quote KMuzzey:

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Then it sounds like a per-album commission might be the best way to go. But realize that if people *do* start buying this music and you suddenly want to switch distributors, you lose any momentum you've gained within iTunes. And if they've already failed, and you don't think they will succeed -- at least, not be successful enough to warrant a $20/year investment in keeping the albums out there on digital platforms -- can I ask why you're releasing them to begin with? I don't mean that to sound snarky, it just sounds like you're entering the arena with the assumption that these efforts have already failed, so you're just going to put them out there... to prove that they failed? Or to see them fail again? It all sounds a bit fatalistic.

---

Well, it would be prohibitively expensive to have all that back-catalogue available under an annual renewal model, so there's no real choice! If I want all that stuff available to hear (and I certainly do), then I have to waive goodbye to the aggregator's cut of any sales.

And I won't be actively promoting that stuff - it's over! done! finished! I need to move on creatively and do new stuff. I don't want to expend and creative brainspace on it ever again. I just need to know it's "available".

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~~~ A weasel hath not such a deal of spleen as you are tossed with! www.feline1.co.uk ~~~

>an audience of 750K with inbuilt momentum

Not wanting to pry too much (just a little, maybe), or sound too sceptical, but where does this audience come from?

As for selling from your own website, yes you should -- Paypal make it easy, as long as you know how to cut some HTML code and paste it into your own site -- but although selling from your own website is growing, most sales are still from retail shops and big websites, and you need to be with them if you want to sell larger amounts.

If you really do think you're going to sell a lot, talk to a CD distributor to get your stuff in store. But they'll expect to see you putting money into promotion.

Depends on the definition of 'failure' doesn't it?

If it is assumed that the purpose of putting stuff out there (ie on iTunes) is to sell in vast quantity and make profit and that doesn't happen, then that can be viewed as a failure.

Satisfaction might be gained from simply knowing that work (of whatever age) is 'out there' on a variety of platforms regardless of sales figures. Publish and move on, that kind of approach...

After all, the difference between a fantastic tune that no-one ever hears and a fantastic tune that everyone knows and loves is a few $k spent on promotion in the right places.

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Sorry I neglected this thread for a while, been working too hard on the album! Is that irony?

To those that asked, yes, we plan to sell through the website and our facebook presence, but I don't really want to deal with the hassle of building my own services... allow me to explain.

We have a website and social media presence, which is going to account for the lion's share of sales. However, our site is already cracking under the strain and we won't have a digital store with proper checkout facilities until at least late November, and there's no point knocking up something amateurish until then. Plus our developer is so immobile that I'd rather just accept that 3rd party services are the way forward for us right now.

Maybe not in a year's time.

Bandcamp here makes perfect sense because I can integrate it directly in Facebook, and embed a widget elsewhere for direct purchases through their system. It can all be aggregated and we don't lose sales through adding steps between discovery and purchase.

With regard to using the money paid in fees to a service to pay instead for our own store to be built, you're missing the discovery opportunities that Bandcamp provides and the extra sales we could get through their userbase. I think that's quite important.

We do have a lot of web traffic already, and we can track where users leave the site, including to go to Bandcamp. They even give you stats: http://blog.bandcamp.com/2009/03/16/the-motherflippin-stats-party-part-deu x/ so I'm confident I won't miss out on all the delicious data about customers and audience activity.

With regard to physical sales, I'm going to see how far we get with comicon revenue before considering a worldwide distributor. Thanks for the tip though.

This is really just a big experiment with our audience, who do seem ready and excited about our first album.

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Composer;
www.ogonline.org

Hi Oggy,

We're really happy with Bandcamp and we switched from our own label system a while ago and are now "hassle free". All my Artists and my own band, Urban Myth Club, use Bandcamp for all our downloads.

One tip is you can still sell CDs direct if you want. Look at how we added a link on our Bandcamp page directing people back to the Urban Myth Club site if they prefer the CD:

http://urbanmythclub.bandcamp.com/

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Recording Artist (urbanmythclub.com), Founder TRL Music, Music Life Coach (musiclifecoach.com).
New Course: The 7 Secrets to Success in Music

That is indeed quite clever... hmmm.

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Composer;
www.ogonline.org

>One tip is you can still sell CDs direct if you want. Look at how we added a link on our Bandcamp page directing people back to the Urban Myth Club site if they prefer the CD:

Okay, I'll bite. How'd you do that?

I'm sure they allowed you to add external links from Bandcamp when you set up each track/album - though I've just had a quick look at the settings and can't see it now (maybe it's been removed for new items since they set up the new merch section but it definitely was there a while back).

Not sure if anyone mentioned it above, but you can set up the physical CD through Bandcamp as well on the same page (the customer then sees both options).

i.e. http://shop.trafficexperiment.net/album/blue-suburbia

The advantage of selling the CD on Bandcamp is that it's all the same checkout and you can also give the option to give the download immediately to people who by the CD (so they can at least listen to it while it's in the post!).

Finally, if you're ok with changing web DNS settings (and they tell you what to do), you can re-point your bandcamp address to your own site's domain or subdomain so that it appears more integrated with your own site:

i.e. http://shop.trafficexperiment.net/ rather than http://trafficexperiment.bandcamp.com/

For what it's worth, we ran our own eShop for a while but I really like BandCamp - it's very straightforward, and they seem very good at listening to their users and implementing changes (PS I've no affiliation to them!).

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Somebody call The Doctor

I'm not yet a Bandcamp customer, but I have been corresponding with their support team on the issues in this thread and they are prompt and very helpful, and the impression I get is that they can do the kind of stuff we all seem to want, but they under-explain what they offer on their site.