IMO, the digital distribution is the only reason to go with CDBaby anymore. The chances of getting random browse-based purchasing from the CDBaby catalog is next to nil at this point. If you have to do your own marketing anyway, why not send people to your Bandcamp page in the first place?
Bandcamp is a much better deal for both the artist and the listener. There is never a reason not to put it on Bandcamp, except that they ostensibly disallow covers entirely.
Bandcamp gives you the following:
- Unlike most sites which take the money up-front and only pay you on a royalty basis afterwards, Bandcamp actually fronts you the money and only takes their cut when the amount rolls over for them, which is ridiculously, surprisingly ethical
- You can set up pay-what-you-want pricing, including $0
- Bandcamp's maximum cut is 15%; this goes down to 10% if you reach a certain sales threshold
- They give you download codes up the wazoo. They default to giving you a bunch of download codes for free every time you hit a certain sales threshold, and you can buy additional download codes for only $0.03 each if you need more before then. They also have a handy code-printer service where you can print out a sheet of codes onto card stock and cut it up and sell it at shows.
- Their metadata is fantastic
- Listeners can redownload anything they buy, and they can download it in a whole bunch of formats (including FLAC and ogg)
- You can play Defender on your statistics graph
See
https://bandcamp.com/pricing for even more details.
Anyway, I guess there's no reason not to also list stuff on CDBaby Free as well, but Bandcamp is totally the way to go as your main sales channel, IMO.
