So you are a band or musical act and would like to sell your music digitally online, in a secure way. The easiest way is to use a digital music distribution site, but what are the potential costs of doing so.

To use as an example we have choosen CD Baby a well known digital music distibution site, and will use its own prices as a demonstration.

Firstly if you wish to sell your music you have to register for a membership account which is similar for most sites of this type. Once registered you can then proceed to upload your music to sell online. The process seems simple enough, and it is. It is why people use these types of service. However, once registered and you want to start uploading you begin to find out the true cost of doing so. Most people do not read the small print or other terms they just sign up, and that as this article will show is a huge mistake.

Above you can see the CD Baby pricing page in the frame, if you cannot see the frame you can always visit the web page. You can see from the page in question that we have not invented any figures etc.

So you have your account and now want to upload some music. You decide to upload say 3 albums of your music, so let us look at the first entry in the pricing table. Album signup is $39.00 per album so 3 albums will cost $117.00 yes $117.00 and you haven’t even sold anything. So you have paid money to upload your music and have paid to do so in the hope of making sales, does this seem right to you? Next say you want to upload 3 single tracks, as an album perhaps contains 10 or more a single track will be free or cost very little, well lets take a look. Looking at the second entry in the pricing chart we see the cost of upload for each single track which is $9.95 per single so your 3 singles will cost, wait for it $29.85 and you haven’t made any sales. So 3 albums and 3 singles have cost you a total of $146.85. I think you will agree that is a reasonable outlay and without a single track sold.

If you then decide you want extras such as a UPC barcode that is another $20.00 per album and $5.00 per single. Those prices soon add up.

So you can see you can spend a lot of money before you have even potentially made a sale. And remember you aren’t guranteed to make any sales at all. So what happens if you make a sale? Well then for each item sold you ALSO pay a commission. Yes more expense, on top of what you have already paid out.

So if we scroll down the page we see the section regarding how much CD Baby pays you. The second box down deals with downloads where it states you get 75% of sale fee which means CD Baby gets 25%. The following is a direct excerpt from that entry “We keep 25% of the purchase price with a minimum of 29 cents. For a download that sells for $9.99 you get paid $7.49, and for a single that sells for 99 cents you get paid 70¢.” Have you noticed that the minimum is 29 cents which means that on a $1.00 download you are actually paying 29% commission if that was a $0.50 sale you would be paying a whopping 58% commission. Yes it really does pay to read the small print and thing about it. On another page completely, click here to view it, they claim “Make the highest profit margin of any online store
Get paid 70¢ for any single you sell for 99¢. For multiple singles transactions, we keep only 25% (minimum 29¢) and pay you a whopping 75% per download sold on our store – more than iTunes, Amazon, and other retailers.” Not completely factual as it is not always 75% due to the minimum charge already mentioned. One other thing to bear in mind is that they claim to pay more than other reatilers in commission, However i doubt they check all the potential competition just the big guns so you can probably find better deals by looking around. New site Music Acts Tracks charges just 20% commission and has a commission price promise too.

So is it easy to find cheaper alternatives. The answer is YES. Music Acts Tracks offers you the ability to do just that. There are no registration charges. There are no upload fees. You just pay 20% commission which is backed by Music acts Tracks commission price promise. It really is that simple.

© Paul Sims 2011