Where to sell my album

[christiannokes]

I'm about to sell my album and I don't want to pay for a subscription service. In this case it isn't about reaching as big an audience as possible. I have a large community of friends that already plan on buying it so I'm thinking maybe a personal website that has an automated payment method on it. Trying to avoid having to send through email repeatedly. I know a little HTML/CSS and am aware of Bootstrap so may be capable of doing that myself with a little elbow grease.

How have you guys done it?

[A.David.MacKinnon]

Why not Bandcamp?

[Nick Sevilla]

If you pay for your website services, most providers have a "market front" capability, to accept many sorts of payments through your website. Free website providers will usually not have this feature. So, you'll end up paying someone to be able to accept online payments.

Some Credit card companies also charge you, the store, a percentage for the use of their CCard services.

Study up on what your website provider offers, and what you are willing to pay monthly for that, and then weigh it against online music resellers like Bandcamp and others.

[digitaldrummer]

you didn't really say what you are selling. Do you mean digital downloads, or a physical CD or vinyl or do you just want people to be able to stream it? Or all of the above?

the answer might be the same or it might be different. Bandcamp will allow you to sell digital downloads and they do actually allow you to sell physical merchandise too, but from what I remember, you are then responsible for fulfillment. Bandcamp does not pay you for streaming. in theory they only allow someone to listen 3 times to each song, but that's easily defeated if one wanted...

Kunaki.com has a free "store". you could sell CDs or even vinyl through them. They do the fulfillment. they don't do streaming. Everyone is a robot. But I've linked the Kunaki store onto my Bandcamp pages before too and then as long as people click the right link they get what they want. But if they just click the big buttons they might get a download but really wanted a physical CD (meaning they did not read, they just clicked) so its not perfect.

Routenote.com has a free option, although what that really means is they take 15% of your streaming/sales revenue (which for me usually turns out to be almost nothing so who cares) but they do push out to all of the famous streaming sites as well as many I had never heard of before. But it's only streaming and digital downloads.

so in the end I use a combination of many sites to try to sell my music and my band's music. And yes it's a pain in the ass to do that, but that's what you get for free.

edit: you didn't actually say free, you said "not a subscription". So there's the CDBaby option too - it's a one time fee not a subscription. But they no longer sell physical copies of anything - only streaming and downloads.

also, if you can write HTML or even if you can't, you can use the Paypal store to put "pay now" buttons on your website. I've done this too. They even give you the code snippet to embed. Fulfillment is again up to you.

[christiannokes]

Well this is exactly the kind of responses I was hoping for. I'm selling 9 digital song files. Maybe as just MP3 or just WAV...or both I don't know. No streaming or physical copies.

David McKinnon- well I was thinking no subscription services. Is Bandcamp subscription based? I might be open to it and CD Baby now especially from everyone's response.

Nick Sevilla- Very useful info. Time for me to do some homework,ahhh

[A.David.MacKinnon]

Bandcamp take a percentage of sales. 15% for digital, 10% for physical. No upfront payment required.

[kslight]

I think I would just do bandcamp for simplicity’s sake.

[vvv]

+1

And I do.

[A.David.MacKinnon]

Not to derail this thread but how do you guys handle Bandcamp if you're working on multiple projects with different names? Is there a way to have everything show up on one page? I have a main band, some solo records, an instrumental duo with my brother and my bandmate had another project while our main thing was on hiatus. It would be wonderful to have all of our projects on the same page or at least have links to the various pages. At the very least it would be great to have my solo things and the duo record with my brother together even though the artist names will be slightly different.

[MoreSpaceEcho]

I think you'd have to re-register with bandcamp as a 'label' to get all your stuff on one page. I dunno if they charge extra for that.

[digitaldrummer]

For Bandcamp you can definitely link multiple accounts to one master account - I do that myself. Look for "connected accounts". Of course that is just to help login to manage the pages.

You can then also list up to 3 (I think) other pages and they show up under "Recommendations". I know that's not the same as listing everything together on one page, but that's what you get for free. If I was going to list everything together, I'd probably do that on a separate personal or "label" web page hosted somewhere else. Or as MSE said, there is a label option on Bandcamp. https://bandcamp.com/labels

A label account pays $20/mo for up to 15 artists or $50/mo for unlimited.

still too rich for my blood. you can get a domain/web page for less.

[drumsound]

Bandcamp take a percentage of sales. 15% for digital, 10% for physical. No upfront payment required.

And they've been doing 'Bandcamp Friday' on the first Friday of the month where their fees are waived.

[vvv]

It's easy to put different projects on the same page - you can name the artist when you do the individual release.

The artist name appears under the name of the release.

A look at my page linked below will show Vlayman, scumble, The Hungry Drunx and others.

You can then put the releases in any order you want so that all artist releases are together (mine are shown chronologically).

On the right side of the page is a "Recommendations" link where you can put links to other stuff.

[A.David.MacKinnon]

Jesus V! That's a lot of records.

[vvv]

Who disclosed my ecumenical name?



Yeah, I know, I need to getta life.

Or a wife ...