Over at David Hooper’s weblog, a debate: should you use your photo of yourself on your CD cover art? David says no, and I agree.
This was something I debated each time I got ready to release a new CD. Dare I put my smiling mug on the cover? In the end, I always decided not [...]
From now on, you’ll be able to buy CD Baby albums through BestBuy.com or in the store itself. For those of you unfamiliar with CD Baby, it’s an online record store based out of Oregon that sells CDs by independent musicians. An organization that sells CDs that come only from the musicians [...]
Years ago, Derek Sivers of CD Baby created a website called Marketing Your Music, and it remains one of my favorite bookmarks. I consider it a must-read for anyone try to “do something” with music. Why more people don’t know about this website, I’ll never know.
Just a handful of my favorite posts:
What has worked on [...]
“Dude, how did you get Amazon to carry your CD?”
There’s no secret to getting your CD sold through Amazon. Kevin Kelly wrote a step-by-step guide over at his Cool Tools website over a year ago. For US$30 a year plus a percentage of each sale, Amazon will stock and ship your CD through the Amazon [...]
As a solo artist I often lose track of how many CDs I sell at shows. When I’m busy chatting with people it’s too easy to just slip the cash into my back pocket, and a real pain to puzzle out several hours later what people actually purchased (uhh, was it two CDs or three [...]
It’s not often that I see a blog post that draws public responses from the brass at hot indie labels like Merge and Secretly Canadian. Patrick Monaghan of Carrot Top Distribution was dismayed to discover CDs from Merge and SC artists available at Best Buy at a deep discount. Concerned that he was witnessing a [...]
That Robert Levine spends two pages talking about digital distribution without mentioning the runaway success of CDBaby boggles the mind.
However, the article does frame up the interesting position that the Orchard has taken. Instead of focusing on the onesy-twosy market of independent musicians that CDBaby handles very well, the Orchard acquires digital distro rights [...]
Scott Andrew relates the story of an independent band that spent an entire week featured on the front of MySpace.com — and managed to sell zero CDs.
This is not uncommon, and not unxpected. Here’s why:
It takes a typical American radio listener EIGHTY or even NINETY listens to your song before they form an opinion [...]
Even a record that goes on to sell ten million units (like the Matchbox 20 major label debut) can start out by selling only 600 copies. It takes time and patience, as Thomas attests.
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A great profile of what it takes to keep an independent record store running these days. When you’re looking at the stores in your own town, are you noticing that what’s selling isn’t exactly what “the scene” is doing? Sales of customer favorites can subsidize the rest of the shop in an 80/20 relationship, as [...]
