Selling Music Online

CdBaby is one of the largest and most popular methods for independent musicians to sell music online these days. They started out selling physical CDs but now handle mp3 downloads as well. If you are an independent musician interested in selling your music online, CDBaby is a serious site to consider.

What CDBaby offers is to set up a page on their site where your CD can be bought. For physical albums, people will be able to order them by credit card and CDBaby will handle the ordering and shipping process and then alert you that an album has been sold. They keep $4 for every album sale and pay you the rest every Monday night. To help your album be sold CDBaby will promote your music online through their own website which receives a lot of traffic everyday.

This all sounds great so far, but CDBaby doesnt just do all of this for $4 from every album sale. There is a $35 one time charge to set up your CD on their site so it is ready to be sold online. This is a fair price for everything that they do, but one of the things that might keep you from using CDBaby for physical album sales is that you have to provide all of the CDs. You have to mail them the CDs to sell every month and they need to look decent too.

This sounds like a pain to me, and is the main reason I will probably never use CDBaby for physical album selling online. But I never really wanted to sell physical CDs anyway. If you arn’t willing to do this, you can still consider CDBaby for selling your music online digitally.

For the same $35 set up charge you can get your album on CDBaby digitally. In addition to having your music on the CDBaby site promotional directories they also submit your album to iTunes, Napster, Rhapsody, and more digital music selling sites. They keep 9% of all digital sales of your music but that is a small price to pay for the amount of exposure they give your album. This part of CDBaby sounds really good, having your music available on all of those high profile sites will really be nice for any independent musician.

CDBaby can be a great option for independent artists looking to sell and promote their music online. They charge a decent price for their services but do enough work for you to make it worthwhile. Many musicians have sold a lot of albums on CDBaby so it can obviously work. They do not get the rights to your music and you can cancel at any time. If you are an independent musician looking for a method of selling your music online, I would seriously consider what CDBaby offers.