I’m asking on behalf of a friend who has some recordings he’d like to sell online. He has CD’s that his band sells at gigs, and he’d like to offer these on the Internet. He’d also like to know how to sell downloadable music files.
I would expect that this is fairly straightforward, considering that a great many people are doing it, but I don’t know anything about it. Any suggestions?
Thanks!
Best wishes,
Jerry
Not that I have direct experience with it (yet) … But CDBaby seems to be a popular choice.
I recommend cdbaby for someone who wants to make their CD (or downloads) available online with a very minor up-front investment on their part. As I remember, it cost $35 to set up an account and they keep one CD, used for putting the sound samples online. You get a web page you can refer people to (see the signature line for ours 
), and you get to piggy-back on a website that has thousands of independent artists so there is some browsing activity. People can find your CD by searching on a genre, a geographic location, or on “sounds like” (you get to list a couple well-known artists for that category).
We haven’t gotten rich from it yet ( can’t help but 
at that thought!) but it’s a fun, easy, and cheap way to get it out there.
hmmmm. You know this is the very subject that impelled me to buy a new PC and internet account wayyyy back in the late 80’s.
The premise was: the “music industry” is infested with useless middlemen that, at every step, seek to blood-suck the talent and don’t give a toss about what happens to them when all the blood is gone. … Can the internet help me get around them all!!!
I got this inspiration from years of dealing with venue owners, entertainment agents, record companies and publishers, plus the panapoly of incidental hangers-on (publicists, recording gurus, drug dealers, police, hells angels, band molls, pimps, government window dressers etc etc etc etc [per tedium ad infinitum]).
SO:
If you are not prepared to exploit the market ruthlessly and keep your set 1 step beyond the music thieves of youtube etc, you are destined to spend a lot and make nothing.
The ONLY chanel to get paid for your art is at the entrance to your live performances - that is the ONLY product a musician really has. You can get involved in the recording stuff, but unless you have a pay-per-play arrangement across the whole of supply, you will never break even, and will simply be feeding the leaches.
Concentrate on keeping your venues full and turn your set every 3 months (the attention span of “the public”). This is the only way to develop “following” - your followers are your bread. To service the apetite of your followers, apart from back-of-venue-CD-sales- simply post the downloads on your own branded website with a paypal pay-for-download widget. Only your true foloowers will avail themselves of the service - everyone else will find somewhere to steal it from. That’s why the live gigs are so important - it is rare that a recording can enthuse support as well as a live experience. Be prepared for the truth that no amount of respect will overcome the average human desire to steal.
If, by some miracle, you become internationally renouned, then your recordings will get “novelty pay” - that’s the market for people who MUST have something before anyone else does - i.e their own vanity. Cool, exploit it if you can 
To get internationally renouned - do not fool yourself that it has anything to do with how good you are at music - the game there is politics, pure and simple (f-f-f-fashion) - get a good accountant and be prepared for him to earn more than you (we are the goon squad and we’re coming to town … beep beep!).
Putting your CD on some distribution point has only the value of advertising - it is a liability, not an asset - make sure you have the right message for the market (i.e. “only the coolest of dudes come to our gigs! Be there or be outcast!”).
Music is not like hambergers - a hamberger gets paid for before the feast, consuming a hamberger is an individual act - music is a cultural feast. The music belongs to the culture, the species - all a musician does is let it loose. Unlike a hamberger, it is not consumed - it is the original burning bush. Get paid for your kindling.
(edited to say:
There is no heaven, there is no hell,
God is right here, and Satan as well,
In musical chairs, it’s best you sit doon,
Your arse sets your future, so choose your seat soon)
ha! wouldnt we all?
has he tried:
There’s also a service called TuneCore which deals
only in digital distribution. They have a different
pricing model if you don’t want to sell physical
media on the net.