Selling music online

Gordon

Sorry if this is in the wrong forum.

A mate of mine is wanting to sell his music online. He is currently in the process of getting a glass master from his mastered CD and is going to try selling his stuff online. He will be setting up a company so as to bypass the record label percentages, and will be trying to distribute through the record label also.

So I'm just wondering if anyone has experience in selling their music online. And what sites do you use? I recommended iTunes but tbh I don't know much about their service or their percentages. He mentioned a number of sites he's seen such as:
http://www.overplay.com/
http://calabashmusic.com/
and http://www.starpolish.com/index.asp

Does anyone use these sites? If so how do they fare with promotion and percentages? Do they take a hefty 50% of your sales or a mere 10%? And do they provide a decent "Top 100" rating system? Also - are there any particular technical details that people need to know?

Thanks for any help.

Doctor J

Bombidol has an online store for his band and some others www.failrecords.com, selling cd's rather than downloads though. Still, might be worth a PM.

Gordon

That's something he'll be doing on his site definitely, although I doubt it will be a commerce type store like that. Although I know you can use commerce stores (oscommerce for example) to allow payment via downloads which is something bombidol should look into actually.

The main reason he wants it is for visibility. On a personal website one would need some traffic (brought about by previous interest) to gain visibility whereas with an existing source for up-and-coming artists they provide top ten links and various promotional means. He isn't an established musician at all.

miju

this might seem like an obvious question but why does your friend want to set up a company and bypass labels when they will look after your mates distribution, payments etc leaving him to just work on his music???

thats why you pay em percentages, they promote and sell music, if i was him i'd adopt that route rather than trying to distribute himself

all though with that said i've been doing loads of online work recently for bands who want their own store ( www.analoguemindfield.com - being the latest ) people can then buy through their store / download from the site directly and the band get the full profits

from my experiences of sites like the above it's more a case of once the site reaches a certain amount of artists on it then promotional / sales opporunties potential is diminished quite alot IMHO

www.worldphonic.com - is a pretty decent one though

bombidol

yeah i set up Fail records to promote my own band and help out a selected few bands. Biggest stumbling block i've ran into is that im crap at site design and stuff. So OScommerce is dead handy for physical CD sales.

Gordon

Aye, I imagine that the benefits to the artist in terms of visibility and marketing factors are fairly small but it's better than nothing in his case.

He's going through the route of making his own company due to percentages and intellectual copyright reasons. I'm not exactly sure why to be honest, I have been a bit skeptical about it but he's got onto lawyers etc so what do I know. (Also, bear in mind that we're in Greece, maybe that makes a difference).

Cheers for the info.