Though I usually just stare at unknown phone numbers with fear, for some reason I bothered to answer the call and was surprised to find that Nimbit was calling to find out how my sales were going. I know it was a sales call, as they want me to upgrade my account and give them some money, but it’s also in their best interests that I sell as much music as possible through my Nimbit OMT.

Artistic Representation of Rick

Given that this is web-based technology, the last thing I expect is to have a human actually call me to talk about my Nimbit account, and address additional ways I can try marketing and selling my music. Given that my music hasn’t “taken off” and I don’t have any gigs scheduled, I probably won’t upgrade my account anytime soon. But it sure raises their cache in my eyes that they actually call their users. I can’t think of any web-based service that’s ever called me to see what’s up…

Just Because You’re Paranoid, Don’t Mean They’re Not After You…

A paranoid person might say that Nimbit called me knowing I write this little blog on music marketing technology, but my rational side tells me that this is wishful thinking.

So, nice work Nimbit. Hopefully you guys will have a smaller module available soon for embedding in sidebars…

Anyone else have any good or bad experiences with these guys?

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What is It?

Popcuts, as it’s called, shares revenue from each download with both artists AND fans. Fans who spot a hit song first stand to make more money, which in effect rewards music listeners for their taste in up-and-coming hits. The idea is to capitalize on the tendency of hipsters and generally cool people, who love to find trendy music before everyone else and rub it in their faces.

Too Cool for School?

It’s an interesting idea, but I’m wondering if their target demographic is too cool to have their coolness institutionalized and commoditized on a website. Perhaps. And the site’s look doesn’t encourage great trendsetting or stylishness. Some people in the Techcrunch comments section pointed out that it’s similar to a pyramid scheme. Hmmm…..

I posted my music here, and we’ll see how things go. Since it’s a relatively new site, perhaps it will offer more visibility than the older ones already flooded with content.

No related posts.

There’s a good introductory article on this topic by David Rose at Know The Music Biz’s Blog. He did a quick survey of his top 10 bands and found that many of them still don’t allow fans to buy mp3’s directly from their websites, myspace profiles, etc. His point being that this just makes it one step harder for people to become your fans. Sure they can go to iTunes, but you might lose some potential listeners that don’t want to bother loading iTunes, etc.

David points to a few services that will allow artists to set up their own webstores for mp3 downloads. These are: Musicane, Hooka, Easybe, and Nimbit.

I’ve checked these out and listed below are some initial thoughts on each one, based on my own requirements as a musician with very limited resources and not a huge fanbase. Most artists aren’t really going to sell that many downloads, no matter how good the music is. So getting free technology is key to making direct music sales worthwhile.

Musicane MP3 Webstore

Musicane is in beta, and their user interface could use some improvements. But the site’s simple and reasonably elegant layout is nice, as is the design of the embeddable mp3 store. They seem to have some big-name artists using Musicane, which may or may not mean something. Musicane takes 30% of sales, and you keep 70%. Paypal enabled.

• Musicane’s service is free to use
• You upload your tracks, copy the “Musicane” code and embed it in any web page you want.
• You can designate a commission percentage, and enable your listeners to embed your music on their webpages. This is a cool way to get them to participate in your success and maybe make some spare change in the process.

Test Run
I spent a while creating a Musicane for my new EP, Bbelief, and the process took much longer than it should, based on some site bugs and user interface gaps…But I think it’s promising…

Hoooka Indie911 MP3 Webstore

Don’t judge a book by its cover, but I usually do anyways. The layout and design of this tool just turns me off. They say that their embeddable mp3 seller can be skinned completely to match your custom site, but the custom Hookas I looked at still suffered from a generally tacky design. They made all the music sites look amateurish. And the company name, “Indie911,” seems geared towards hobbyists and tools.

Hooka does, however offer 80% of the sales revenue, taking only 20% for themselves.

Easybe - a 1-2-3 Music Store - Sell Music Downloads

Unlike the tools above, Easybe is not web-based software that just outputs a code for you to use. Easybe lets you run the whole operation yourself, and is essentially a php-based software solution that you implement and manage yourself. It has advanced features like email list management and tracking, and enables unlimited operations, theoretically.

Easybe requires $68 upfront for artists, and $168 for labels. Since I’m an indie artist and may not even sell $68 worth of music anytime soon from my website, this is not an option for me. If I start doing high volume sales, this would be cool, because it offers better marketing tools and, beyond the upfront fee, you keep all revenue for yourself. Nice. So if you sell thousands of tracks and don’t like sharing the pie, this could work for you.

Nimbit Digital Music Downloads

Nimbit is kind of a hybrid of the above, because it offers both free and paid versions of the service, with some sophisticated and large volume tools to sell not only mp3 downloads, but merchandise and tickets.

• The free service enables you to embed your mp3s for sale on any webpages, and your fans can too.
• The company will even skin your Nimbit seller for you, for about $100.
• Nimbit can also get your tracks into iTunes, Rhapsody, and several other popular online distributors.

Test Run
Nimbit’s service centers around the OMT, or Online Merch Table, where an artist can sell anything they wish. For the FREE service, you can sell digital downloads, and are limited to the default skin for your OMT. But the user interface is much more robust / thorough than Musicane’s, and seems much further along than Musicane. They offer a wider array of services, too. While I don’t love the look of the OMT (I wish it were smaller and not so high-tech looking), it works and seems to work well. I embedded it on my Bbelief page. When I installed the OMT app on my Facebook page yesterday, it said that there were 9 total users of that app. So, clearly these apps have not reached widespread use…

Nimbit mails checks to you, which seems old fashioned. It would be better if they had some Paypal and ACH transfers…

Your Turn
Are You Using Any of these MP3 webstores on Your Sites? Let Us Know in the Comments Section…

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The album creation and upload process was pretty straightforward, and TuneCore’s user interface is very clean and easy to use. The tracks took forever to upload, but it was ~160MB for 4 songs.

Only two quibbles:

1. The help links on the album creation/upload pages open in the same browser window, which made me worry I was going to lose the information I had already entered. These should open in pop-up windows.
2. After uploading a track, it says “Verifying file” or something, and a circular icon rotates to show you that the file is being processed. I waited for this to stop, but it never did on its own. I was afraid to do anything else because I didn’t want to corrupt the file I had waited an hour to upload. Turns out, once verification begins, you can add another song below, and when the page refreshes, it will indicate that the previous track has been added successfully. This wasn’t clear to me, so I wasted a lot of time waiting for something that never happened.

These are really just small usability issues…

Each Digital Distributor is Different

TuneCore does a good job of laying out all the payment intricacies involved with each of the digital distributors that you can push your music to. Each service is different and may be more or less profitable for artists. But I figure that the more ways someone can discover my music, the better. Everyone I know buys music from iTunes, but maybe some users of the other services will discover me somehow.

And now…The wait.

After completing the upload and album creation process, then paying, the site returns a message saying that the music should be available in 8-10 weeks. Damn. This is a long time. I’m sure Apple and company have billions of terabytes to process, but still. Two months seems quite long. Oh well. At least it’s out of my hands now.

Update
It didn’t take nearly as long as I feared for my music project to go live with the various services. In many cases, it was only a few weeks. Awesome!

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Tunecore distributes music for musicians of all sizes to the hottest and most widely used digital music platforms. Founded in 2005, Tunecore customers have sold over $45 million of music.

Digital Music Distribution:
Upload your music to Tunecore and pick which stores you want to sell your music. Choose from the following stores:

• iTunes (6 different countries)
• Amazon MP3
• eMusic
• Lala
• IMVU
• Rhapsody
• MySpace Music
• Amie St
• Shockhound
• Nokia Music store
• Limewire store

…and more 

Choose a couple of your favorite sites or every available music distribution outlet for maximum exposure.

Reporting Tools
Login at Tunecore.com to get stats on how many songs and albums you’ve sold via each music outlet. Withdraw your earnings any time via Paypal or have a physical check mailed to you.

Sell Music from Your Own Sites
Tunecore gives you a widget that you can embed on other sites like MySpace and Facebook to give your fans more direct access to your music. Boost sales by putting your songs in front of as many people as possible.

Here’s a summary of what I thought were Tunecore’s major pros and cons:

TUNECORE
Pros:

• Artists that want to circumvent making physical CDs entirely can go straight to digital format via TuneCore. Get your music in all the major online retailers without ever producing a physical CD.
• TuneCore’s fees are very low: $0.99 per submission per service, and a $19.98 annual fee per album.
• Using TuneCore gives artists access to auxiliary licensing opportunities in film and television.
• TuneCore offers good concrete tips on promoting indie music.
• TuneCore has no binding contracts, so you are welcome to take your music offline after a year if you feel your sales from the album won’t exceed the $19.98 maintenance fee.
• Right now TuneCore is offering a 30% discount on your first submission if you sign up through my link: Save 30% on first TuneCore distribution, sign-up is Free!
• CD Baby charges $20 per barcode whereas TuneCore provides barcodes and UPC’s free of charge.

Cons:

• If you stop paying TuneCore’s annual “Maintenance” fee, they will have your music taken down from the services. Which is lame. Allegedly the maintenance fee pays for their servers to store your music projects, but if your music is already on iTunes, etc. and you have no desire to add them to additional services, you are basically paying them NOT to take your music off iTunes, which is like a bribe. Or ransom. Unless they are paying Apple to keep the tracks up there. Which I am guessing is HIGHLY improbable.

One of Tunecore’s major competitors is CDBaby. Here are a few of the pros and cons regarding CDBaby:

CD Baby

Pros

• Like TuneCore, CD Baby greatly simplifies the process of submitting your music to the major online distributors like iTunes.
• If you’ve already got a physical CD for sale with CD Baby, they will process and send it to a bunch of online distributors for free!

Cons

• If you don’t have physical CDs but want digital distribution, CD Baby will cost you more money up front than TuneCore.
• CD Baby keeps 9% of the money from your downloads.

My Decision to use TuneCore for my current release

I’ve used CD Baby a few times over the past several years, and I think they do an excellent job distributing independent music. This choice is not really “which service is better,” but rather, which one is best given my current needs.

The two primary factors in my decision making are:

1. I am broke
2. I am not printing physical CDs right now (see #1)

So for me, it comes down to a few basic cost factors:

1. CD Baby requires a $35 setup fee plus $20 for a UPC barcode = $55 startup costs.
2. TuneCore’s one-time fees are: $0.99 per song. $0.99 per store per album. Annual maintenance fee of $19.98. Since my EP has four tracks, my 1st year costs with TuneCore will be $28.89, assuming I put my music in 5 online stores.

My Logic – Does it Make Sense?

Once I’ve paid CD Baby the upfront costs, I’m done with out-of-pocket expenses. But with TuneCore I’ve got to sell enough music to recoup my $20 annual maintenance fee. But remember, CD Baby takes 9% of your sales money. So I’m praying that I sell a lot of music, effectively betting that the total annual maintenance fees I will pay over time to TuneCore are less than 9% of my total sales revenue. And I’m also glad to be saving ~$26 upfront, since I’m still broke.

An Afterthought

Another advantage I forgot to mention is that with TuneCore, you upload your digital tracks directly. CD Baby still requires sending them a physical CD, which they add to their online store as an out-of-stock item. I have a very hard time getting to the post office, so…

More Info

Save 30% on first TuneCore distribution, sign-up is Free!

CD Baby

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