I'm coming out with my first cd soon... a seven-song mini-album. I printed 300 copies as that was the smallest I could go without it becoming a CD-R instead of a redbook. They'll arrive in a couple of weeks, and I'm thinking of selling them for $10 apiece. I spent a few years writing the songs and figuring out how to record and produce them as professionally as I'm able. I spent countless hours on the project and somewhere between $5,000 and $10,000 on production costs. Despite that, I know the drill - I don't really have expectations of making a lot of money on this, or even meeting my costs. But I do intend to try as hard as I can to maximize my revenue.

It's amazing what kind of culture has sprung up in the selling/delivery sphere. All these companies spring up to "empower" the indie musician and they invest in all sorts of signaling to make sure we know we had better sign up for their services or else we're not taking our career seriously. Examples:

CDBaby: keeps $4 of every cd sale, even though you've already spent $1-$3 per every cd you manufacture. As opposed to just setting up a paypal link or merchant account on your website, and shipping it yourself. 2.9% + $0.30 sounds a lot better than $4. (Shipping costs are additional either way and passed on to the user.) I have trouble imagining at what point I'd want to spend $3.41 per cd to save myself the effort of just sticking a mailing label to a padded envelope and dropping it in my mailbox.

Bandcamp: keeps 10% (by way of keeping every 10th chunk of revenue for itself). It's based around the belief that people will pay more if it's freely available, or will tend to pay more than the "suggested" price. I haven't really dived into their studies but I just cannot believe there isn't a flaw in them. A lot of it seems based off of the logic that if it worked for Radiohead or NIN (with their already built-in audiences) then it should also work for small indie musicians. (And Radiohead and NIN have also since stepped away from the free/pay-what-you-want model.) At any rate, 2.9% + $0.30 sounds better than 10%, since I have to do fulfillment on my end either way.

iTunes/digital media: $0.99 no matter what. $6.93 for a seven-song album, and you can't set your own price. If you have a major label you can apparently set your album price higher but smaller indies don't seem to have access to that privilege. Plus, if your digital album costs $6.93, then you've basically destroyed your options of selling your hard-copy.

And everyone knows the common complaints about spotify and pandora.

At any rate, I'm considering going through a lengthy staged release process, in an effort to measure all sorts of conversion and gather data along the way.

1) Release physical cd only, with no music previews. At this point, the few hundred people on my mailing list are already interested in the cd anyway, so we'll see how far that goes, along with recommendations to friends. Maintain a list of addresses for people who indicate they won't buy until it's released digitally.

2) Marketing music previews of each song and on an album level, through promoted Facebook posts (friends-of-friends) and advertising. The general principle here is to still not ever release the entire full-length tracks, and funnel people to buying the physical cd.

3) Release digitally to services that are not on-demand and can't be downloaded. This means Jango and Pandora. Jango also allows me to buy paid plays and get a bunch of demographic data points to see which tracks are popular with which groups. I can then use that to do more targeted ads over at facebook or maybe through google.

4) When things are really dying down physically, finally release through iTunes and bandcamp (allow full previews) and other sites where you can actually buy the tracks digitally, and see what happens with "discovery"

5) When I'm finally ready to just trash the whole project, release it on Spotify and forget about it to start working on the next cd.