Product Reviews
MusicBizAdvice.com reviews products, services, and tools for your music
business career. Here we discuss websites for online CD sales.
Selling CDs Online: The Orchard, CD Baby,
Amazon, CD Now, or Netweed?
by Dave Jacintho
These days a musician needs to be more than just a musician if he or she
plans on getting out of the basement and into iPods. Singers must also be
webmasters, guitarists double as booking agents and promoters, bass players
become master publicists, and drummers? Well, we basically still just bang
on stuff (kidding).
We've all heard the same song and dance from people in the biz: What's your
draw? How many people are on your mailing list? How are your merch sales?
Have a CD out? How many have you sold? The fact of the matter is that the
music business is a business, whether we of the punk rock mentality like it
or not, and it is up to us as musician-promoter-publicist-booker-managers to
figure out how best to use the tools available to us to succeed.
Every day we are inundated with more technology, more options, more avenues
to utilize to make, promote and distribute music independently. But how do
you make yourself stand out and rise above the sea of independent artists
clamoring for the same ears that you covet? One of the best ways to get
yourself out there is to combine the old school with the new by selling your
CDs online.
There are plenty of outlets on the 'net to pedal your wares, but for our
purposes here we'll stick with five of the most well-known and frequently
patronized: CD Baby, The Orchard, Netweed, CD Now, and Amazon. Each of these
companies can be beneficial in their own way, depending on an artist's
intended direction, as well as the level of success he/she has already
achieved.
The first place I'd like to take us is to Netweed. Probably the smallest of
the sites mentioned above, www.netweed.com
is more of an online community than a retail outlet, and is focused on the
Hip-Hop genre. Since we're concerned in this article simply with selling
CDs, this may not be the best place to do it. While the site seems to have a
fairly wide viewership, I get the impression that its focus is more on the
sharing of ideas and providing a directory of resources than on music sales.
In order to even get to the hip-hop albums Netweed is advertising, one has
to click around and do some digging to find the page, and once there,
choosing an album simply redirects you to Amazon's listing. So in my
opinion, you may as well just go to Amazon to begin with. While this seems
like a great community for an amalgam of other things hip-hop related, a
place to boost your album sales it ain't. For CD sales, I give it 2 out of 5
stars.
The Orchard is another story all together. One of the largest, if not the
largest, distributors of digital music on the web,
www.theorchard.com can be a great
help in getting your music to the world through the internet but seems to be
geared to those who are already a few steps along the way. While they accept
submissions from anyone, they have so many established labels and artists on
their roster, it seems as though it would be quite easy to get lost in the
shuffle as a small independent artist.
That said, The Orchard is definitely a place that can be beneficial if used
to its potential, because they supply music to all the major online music
stores, including iTunes, Rhapsody, MusicMatch, Napster, eMusic, and many
others, as well as online retailers such as Amazon, CD Now, BestBuy, and
Barnes and Noble.
Another great thing about The Orchard is the added visibility they give
artists through ad placements and their “weekly playlist” feature. The
Orchard works very closely with the online stores to be sure their artists
are receiving the best ad placements possible, and works with the stores to
create and explore new avenues for exposure when placements are not an
option. With their “weekly playlist,” The Orchard distributes listings by
genre, current events, moods, and other categories, lumping emerging artists
in with more well-known and established artists to give them an added boost
in exposure.
Overall, this is an excellent resource for getting your music into as many
outlets as possible, and for gaining some much needed exposure on the 'net
that can in turn help CD sales exponentially. 4 out of 5 stars.
Now for the big boys, CD Now and
Amazon. I lump these two sites together
because they offer basically the same services, due to the fact that CD Now
is a subsidiary company of Amazon. CD Now is a little more useful due to its
focus on music and video, but Amazon still offers virtually the same
features. To me, these sites are useful as another storefront to have your
CDs in, but they are so massive and major artist-focused that it's basically
the equivalent of sticking a couple albums into the racks at the Virgin
Megastore and hoping for the best.
One cool feature of CD Now and Amazon however, is the way they suggest
similar artists when a customer is searching for music. A benefit of this
for independent artists here could be that someone searching for, let's say,
a Norah Jones album might just happen to stumble upon your CD because the
database recognized that Norah's fans might dig your brand of jazz. Overall
though, I'd say that these sites are alright as an additional place to sell
a few discs, but not necessarily the place to make your mark as an
independent artist. 3.5 stars.
Last, and certainly not least, we come to my personal favorite,
CDbaby.com. Completely dedicated to the
sale of independent music, CD Baby has quickly become the place to be for
unsigned artists on the 'net. In addition to selling your CDs, CD Baby, like
The Orchard, can help to get your music distributed to all the major digital
music outlets, such as Napster, iTunes and Rhapsody.
Another great feature, and one that my band has recently taken advantage of,
is that CD Baby will provide you with a credit card swiper that you can take
anywhere to sell more merchandise. How many times have you played a show and
gotten the old “Gee, I'd love to buy a CD, but I don't have any cash on me…”
routine? Well, they may not have cash on hand, but these days most people at
least have a debit card. With the swiper, it's that much easier to boost
your sales.
With an incredible easy to search database and a wealth of additional
resources, CD Baby is a fantastic tool that can be a huge benefit to the
independent artists. I would say that this is the benchmark at the moment
for artists looking to sell their CDs online, as well as those looking to
garner attention from labels looking for up-and-coming bands who are
generating a buzz, because one of the best ways to build that buzz is
through sales of your music.
*****5 stars.
Dave Jacintho is the drummer for Six
Day Slide, a Boston-based pop/rock band.
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