29 January 2006

Sell indie music on iTunes

Hm...I believe I said something about this a few days ago, and Tunecore is a new site that hooks it up. You can distribute your music in iTunes and Rhapsody, with "many more coming soon!" You pay a one-time "delivery fee" of $0.99/service (i.e. iTunes Canada, Japan, U.K., Australia, or Rhapsody--iTunes U.S. is free) and then a storage fee of $7.98/year/album. You get paid per download, but there's a "legal issue" preventing them from listing how much you make--that's the one thing I'm not sure about. I'd want to at least have some idea of what I'd be making before I signed up (not that I have any music I need the world to hear, but you know...). You keep the rights to your songs, of course.
They also offer tools for creating album art, and are planning to offer merchandising options (i.e. t-shirt creation) in the near future. In short, they seem to do everything I've called for. The only question is how negotiable the contract is. Big artists, like the ones on MTV (/gag) will never have any reason to distribute music this way if they're making the same $/song as Cheese Head (R.I.P., no offense Michelle :)). Granted, they're likely to sell more if they're more popular, and should thus earn more money automatically, but at present there's too much greed in the industry for anyone to see that. In any case, check out the site if you're interested, because I'm sure I've left something out.
Oh, and though its mere presence on my blog implies this, I'll go ahead and say it: "I /certify the Awesomeness of this idea."

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