Trent Reznor and Keith Richards selling albums through Amazon partnership: your band can too for $35

[thewayne]

It's a curious thing. You upload your artwork, music, liner notes, etc. to Amazon and pay them "$31 a year in upfront fees to handle a 10-track CD from pressing to delivery, passing all other costs through to the buyer." The artist makes about 40% of the charged price, "If one of Amazon’s 80 million customers buys your 10-song CD on Amazon for $8.98, you’ll receive $3.59. After selling just nine discs, you’re in the black."

Interesting proposition. You're not getting the promotion of a major label, but you're getting a heck of a leg up with distribution. Some of the comments on the article dispute the economics of the system vs burning your own discs to sell at gigs, I wonder if there's something in the fine print that says that you can't do both.

At any rate, have to send this article on to my brother and a couple of friends.

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/05/amazon-to-unveil-on-demand-cd-printing-service-with-tunecore/

Comments

[kylejcrb.livejournal.com]

Sounds like they pretty much took the entire concept of CDBaby, which has been around for years. Not that it's a bad thing, it's just that this is hardly new.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

Yeah, they specifically reference CDBaby in the comments. The economics and minimums seem to be a bit different, but you do have the larger name recognition of Amazon.

[silveradept]

This makes sense - there's a lot of X on Demand going around, which I think is good. It was only a matter of time before one house decided to try and make themselves have all the X on demand possibilities. Amazon's the one that could probably do it.