The Song Fight Bulletin Board

I know many (most?) of us aren't into music to make money, but I stumbled CreateSpace this morning:

https://www.createspace.com/

Basically, it looks like a multimedia self-published service. It's part of Amazon, so it's closely tied to that, but the plethora of options seems very interesting, and it appears to be 100% royalty-driven, so the artist pays nothing up front.

I made an account, and I have to say it seems pretty user-friendly. Very much geared for the technologically-unfriendly. Since I've built an album before, there are some limitations that I find a little irksome (why can't I make a booklet for my all-MP3 album?) and the "Cover Creator," while pretty intuitive, is quite limited and feels, well, amateurish. Like working with Roxio.

Anyway, check it out. Or if you have already, what do you think?

Both of my physical CDs are handled via CreateSpace. It works quite well. The quality is quite good and the bulk buying prices work out better than any of the other short-run services I've seen. If you happened to see a copy of "Love and Monsters" at SFLive last year, that was manufactured by Createspace.

You can't do boklets for your all-MP3 album because where the hell is the booklet going to go?

For digital distribution I much prefer bandcamp though. Basically I use Createspace to manufacture the discs and for Amazon retail placement, Bandcamp for online digital distribution (and my own storefront), and CDBaby for retail and mainstream digital services (including AmazonMP3 just to keep things simple).

The booklet could exist purely as an .PDF, couldn't it? I make booklets for all of my bandcamp albums.

Yeah, Bandcamp lets you attach other files to an album download, but AmazonMP3 doesn't. Well, they do if you're a major label, but for CreateSpace they don't have a mechanism for that. Honestly I don't think that the vast majority of people selling stuff through CreateSpace would benefit or even understand how to do it well enough (I mean, look at their forums someday, yeesh).