CD Baby are a distributor for independent music and we chose them for the following reasons:
- online sales for physical CDs and digital downloads
- listing on iTunes and a range of other online download stores
- web hosting (more below) Host Baby
- recommended by a muss mate
- good purchasing experience personally

Host Baby was the big attraction for me, not being very familiar with HTML the template and menu driven approach made it easy to get a good result. In the process I worked out how to add various gadgets to link to YouTube, PayPal, Facebook, Twitter and our Blog.

The sign up process was really easy and include instant access to our own domain name www.Mu-theory.com

In terms of price, I think there are cheaper hosting options but we got free vouchers for CD Baby listings bundled in and it just seemed so easy and integrated.

We haven't posted the 5 CDs required for inventory yet, but the listing process was easy and I you only want download sales then you can upload the lot. We had a little trouble using the voucher but the CD Baby team are very quick with support and overall they ooze friendliness.

I'm a fan (no connection to them) and very happy to date. Minor jiggles could be raised about a few hosting builder features, the blog, sub menu navigation but it worked 95% for me being only vaguely capable with web technology.

For me the big winner is gadgets, working that out was easy and it opened up the whole web.

Check out our site www.Mu-theory.com (we're an original rock band from melbourne Australia)
The build in music player is cool too (unless you use safari) and can play whole or part tracks - we've put 1 minute excerpts from the album on it.

Hope this helps other independent artists.

Ian

Keys for Mu-Theory

Www. Mu-theory.com.

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www.mu-theory.com

The MP3 downloads were enabled in about 2 weeks, which included postage from Australia. That's reasonable since they scanned to artwork from the CD cover and ripped the CD to MP3. I'm told that listing on iTunes and Amazon is likely to be another 3-4 weeks.

Ian

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www.mu-theory.com

Here's the latest instalment on the CD Baby story.
We finally appeared on iTunes. iTunes themselves listed us within about 24 hours of the CD Baby notification but it seemed to take a long time to get queued for release by CD Baby. Aside from the delay I now also realise that iTunes seem to set their own pricing. I was trying to get some parity in pricing across the digital channels but that seems too hard. Still waiting for Amazon (and eMusic, Rhapsody & Napster - although I can't check these since they don't allow Australian IPs).

http://itunes.apple.com/au/artist/mu-theory/id472057725

Edited by ruthers (11/10/11 09:53 PM)

CD Baby seem to have made a lot of connections. The latest I've discovered is Jango.com internet radio. Our CD Baby list has given us some free plays on Jango.com. I suspect there are a number of services like Jango.com but I like to geographical and artist targeting. Age and Sex (premium service) seems cool too.

It's a bit of an ego trip to log into the artist site and see "Bill from Toronto listened to Until We Lose It" or similar. I'll be checking our main web site to see what kind of referred traffic we generated but the site offers Fans, Comments and all the modern social/web links including your stores on iTunes, Amazon etc.

It's all part of the journey and rather interesting.

If you're thinking about trailing it, use this link as I think you get some credits as a referred artist (haven't quite worked this bit out yet)

http://airplay.jango.com/invites/167924

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www.mu-theory.com