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Lately I have been checking out various ways to sell my original music online. I think the days of selling a physical CD to someone is limited, and with new online services coming out every week, why not take advantage of them?

Obviously the most successful online music store to date in my opinion is the iTunes music store. But how do you get your bitchin new album up on iTunes? Easy! Enter Tunecore . In fact Tunecore will put your music up on most major online music stores including iTunes, Napster, Rhapsody, MusicNet, eMusic, and Sony Connect for a small fee of course. Tunecore does charge a one time fee of $0.99/song when uploading to their system as well as a $9.98 maintenance and storage fee per year per album. Each store you want to upload your music to will cost you another $0.99 per store. For example: if you had a 10 song EP, and wanted to sell that album at 5 different stores, it would initially cost you $24.83, and then $9.98 a year after that….not bad, not bad.

Myspace is becoming a popular site for music, and I actually have been finding bands that have better Myspace pages than regular websites, so it is not surprising that Myspace has recently offered an online music store add on that you can incorporate into your profile (or any other site for that matter). Myspace relies on Snocap to handle the sale, storage, and download of the music. Sign up is free, but Snocap does take a cut of each sale. From what I could find on the Snocap site, they charge $0.39 per download….. Ouch! So if you are selling an album for $9.99 you would actually only end up getting about $6. BUT the kicker is that you set the price at which you want to sell your music. So Snocap’s Mystore is an option, with a plus being you can incorporate your “Mystore” into any site, not just Myspace.

Another new online music store that caters to indie artists is Digstation.com which I found through discmakers.com (so I am guessing they are affiliated in someway). Digstation claims to pay you $0.70 for every $0.99 song sold…. not bad. Digstation also claims to have your music up in a matter of days, opposed to the months it could take to get your music up on iTunes.

Amazon.com’s Advantage program will also allow you to sell your CD online (not digitally though as of yet), but they will charge you $29.95 per year, and a %55 commission. IndieHQ has a good write up of selling through Amazon without a distributor.

CDbaby.com is yet another place that will handle the sale and shipping of your newly released album. They will also act as the middle man between you and online stores such as iTunes taking a 9% cut on all digital sales. If you sell a physical CD through CDbaby expect to pay them $4 per CD purchase. $4 sounds like a lot, but remember they are physically storing your album, handling the purchase as well as shipping.

So as you can see there are many different ways to have your music available for purchase directly on the internet! All services have their pro’s and con’s, but keep in mind that if you sign a deal with one distributor that say for instance will handle iTunes sales, DO NOT sign a deal with another distributor that also deals with iTunes. iTunes will remove your content until you decide which distributor you actually want to use, because DUH….how would they know which distributor to pay?

I personally would probably use all a mixture of all of these services, relying on Tunecore and Snocap to handle all digital sales, Amazon and CDbaby to handle physical sales. This means you can lower your duplication costs by only having say a couple hundred pressed first, then see how the album is received. If you need to run more, than good for you! If not, you aren’t stuck with a few thousand CD’s laying around.

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