Our first paycheck from the other music services, courtesy of CDBABY

I received our first paycheck today from CDBABY, who supplies our music to iTunes, MSN music and other stores.

The good news, is that at $992.02, it's actually worth depositing, and amounts to something. The bad news is that no single artist made over $100, this for about 3 months worth of digital sales (sept-oct-nov). I'm not too surprised, given how large a catalog is on iTunes, and most artists are happy to see an extra $50 in sales, for not having to do anything. This is a *lot* better than the less-than-one-dollar check I receive from musicnow (67 cents, last month), which *isn't* worth depositing. With sales like that, is it any wonder Music Now just sold to AOL?

Some of the better sellers are obviously because of keyword matches, such as the Brook Street Band's "Handel Oxford Water Music" and DA CAMERA: A Celtic Celebration while others like EHREN STARKS: The Depths of a Year and HEAVY MELLOW: Acoustic Abstracts must be found by some other means. I was happy to see a few artists who don't sell too well on Magnatune nonetheless do decently on iTunes, such as JAMIE JANOVER, MICHAEL MASLEY and KITKA. I think that shows that iTunes has a different musical audience than what Magnatune draws.

Interestingly, there are virtually no Magnatune rock artists selling decently on iTunes -- the only appearance in my sales records is BURNSHEE THORNSIDE, and what they do is pretty special.

So, the verdict is that iTunes will be a nice supplemental revenue, but for now at least, won't make a major impact. And... what iTunes apparently rewards is our more esoteric catalog.

CDBABY's accounting system tells me the total amount they've paid per album since the 1st day we signed up with them, not how each payment to us was broken up by artist album. That's not perfect for my accounting, as I was planning on reporting these other-services-payments to my artists as music-license-sales (ie, we license the music to iTunes) but instead it'll need to show up as a single line-item in musician's reports (other digital music services: $xxx.xx) that increases over time. It's a little funky to have a line-item in your royalties that grows over time, but as long as the numbers are honest, I hope that'll be ok for musicians.

And of course, CDBABY's timing couldn't be better, with them sending me my first paycheck a week before I'm about to pay my musician's royalties.

However, iTunes isn't selling any Magnatune artists who don't have cover art in our system. That's about half our artists, which is my bad (though they don't tell you this, the albums just mysteriously don't make their way onto the site), but Joel has spent the past 60 days scanning these all in (so they'll also be on www.magnatune.com, which is real good) and we'll shortly re-upload those albums to iTunes so that they sell those too.

-john

Comments

[zborgerd]

Interesting. I'm a bit curious as to how the CDBABY agreement works. I've noticed that some Magnatune artists have their CDs available from within CDBABY's store. My understanding is that CDBABY has always been a store, and not a "record label"... But perhaps I'm mistaken?

[John Buckman]

CDBABY is who Magnatune uses to get its music onto other music stores, such as iTunes. Besides their CD store, they also have a digital distribution service at http://www.cdbaby.net/dd

I had announced on this blog that I was going to use The Orchard for this service that does a similar thing, but a number of people popped up to tell me that The Orchard has a really bad reputation (indeed, we experienced that when my wife's former label had to threaten to sue to get paid -- something I've since learned is a common experience with the Orchard, though evidently they're now trying to change their behavior in order to change that reputation).

Anyhow, after I announced my intentions to use The Orchard and a bunch of people warned me not to, Derek from CDBABY popped up and said he really wanted to work with me (and Magnatune) and he and I hammered out an agreement for CDBABY to supply our music to all the other digital distribution services.

As far as cases where musicians themselves sign up with CDBABY (something which is totally permitted under the Magnatune artist agreement) there's no problem, and Magnatune simply doesn't send those to CDBABY and there's no problem.

[zborgerd]

Seems like a very nice agreement for everyone involved. Looks like they distribute to several download services. Does anyone know if any of their partners offer lossless downloads (e.g. FLAC)?

[John Buckman]

Does anyone know if any of their partners offer lossless downloads (e.g. FLAC)?

I know that CDBABY stores everything internally as FLAC files, but I don't know that many services which sell lossless files. Besides Magnatune.

[Matthias Delay]

Congratulations, CDBaby is a very good choice. I work with them since a long time and I am extremely happy and satisfied with their service - and the prompt payments.

regarding losless files: beatport.com is offering WAV files since a few weeks, I don't know if CDBaby already works with them.

[Susan Carroll]

Curious...what's the percentage paid to the distributor and the retailer? Is it possible to distribute directly through a consortium of other independent labels?