The Song Fight Bulletin Board

Now you can sell your music on CDbaby.com with no set cost up or fees. They take only 15% of your sales.

http://members.cdbaby.com/free

I'm not sure how this compares to bandcamp.com. The main question I had was about the digital distribution, which is NOT included.

CD Baby FREE gives you a no-cost way to get your music selling online. If you're just looking for a single place to send your fans so they can purchase downloads of your music, CD Baby FREE is right for you! However, it does not include distribution to digital music retailers (such as iTunes, Amazon, etc.) or streaming services (such as Spotify, Beats Music, etc.). If you want to offer your music on the world's most popular stores and platforms, select CD Baby Standard or CD Baby Pro.

If you just want somewhere to sell some songs, or ANOTHER place to sell your music online. Check it out.

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.

Another great thing about Bandcamp is that you can set it up to be your main page if people go to your personal URL. This is super handy if you're not great at making websites.

Here's another advantage of Bandcamp... back when I was making the album Romance in the Mylar Garden (instrumental collaboration with comic book artist Matt Howarth), he asked me to not allow downloads of single tracks, but rather have it only available as a whole album with the accompanying comic book, and Bandcamp made it really easy to include a non-music file in the download. Unlike the other services I looked at!
http://heuristicsinc.bandcamp.com/album ... lar-garden
-bill

HeuristicsInc wrote:Here's another advantage of Bandcamp... back when I was making the album Romance in the Mylar Garden (instrumental collaboration with comic book artist Matt Howarth), he asked me to not allow downloads of single tracks, but rather have it only available as a whole album with the accompanying comic book, and Bandcamp made it really easy to include a non-music file in the download. Unlike the other services I looked at!
http://heuristicsinc.bandcamp.com/album ... lar-garden
-bill

Oh, yeah, those are other things I meant to mention - bundled digital content, and album-only downloads. I make use of both of them!

I just got a payment of $18.50 from CD Baby. That was really cool. That is a lot of Spotify plays at 0.5c a play or whatever it is.