I heard a new band at the Oktoberfest festival in my town this weekend, Paper Bird, and I was thinking of buying their latest CD. I found their website and they had the CD on sale for $15 but there are a couple of other CDs that I’ve been thinking of grabbing of Amazon so I figured I’d price check them for shipping since I figured combining the shipping would lower my overall cost.
Funny thing, the CD is $.02 cheaper on Amazon. This got me wondering if there is any benefit to the artist from me buying off their site as opposed to Amazon?
Speaking as someone with a family member in the independant music industry, I can authoritatively say: It depends.
Odds are, however, it probably doesn’t make a huge difference, because they’re probably not running their own web based store with direct mail CD delivery service. It’s POSSIBLE, but relatively unlikely, unless they’re a very, VERY small outfit. So someone is taking the whole “sales and delivery” cut out of the price regardless. The outfit doing it for the webpage is probably taking a smaller cut, or the artist wouldn’t have chosen them, but just because you’re buying it “direct” from the artist doesn’t mean they’re personally putting your CD in an envelope and mailing it to you. They probably have a middleman organization like CDBaby or something similar. I can’t really say for sure though - an investigation of the site you linked doesn’t really make it clear one way or the other.
How about, instead of asking random people here, why not ask them? They’ve got a contact page, and I bet that if they make more off a direct sale, they’d be happy to tell you.
I wasn’t thinking that they were personally mailing it to me they’re a bit too established for that sort of thing. I was surprised that their method would have a greater mark up then Amazon or I was thinking that maybe they were getting a bigger cut.
I’m also curious about other independent artists and how they make their money if any one knows something.
This question is…too broad for me to try to answer. My sister is an independant singer/songwriter, and can be found on pandora/amazon/iTunes, etc, and receives royalty payments for all those outfits (and others.) Is that what you’re asking?
I have emailed a couple of smaller bands that I like and asked them this question. I am hoping to get an answer, since they’ve responded to emails from me before (that’s one nice thing about smaller artists). I’ll post if I get responses.
I have gotten responses from both, and they both said buying from the web site makes them more money than buying from amazon. They didn’t mention specific amounts (I didn’t think they would), but both said they “definitely” do better from purchases on their own site. Which makes sense, as Amazon has to make money from carrying the albums, so they take a cut.
These are smaller bands though, and are on independent record labels (one band owns their own label). I would imagine for huge mainstream artists, it doesn’t matter as much, since they only get a small fraction per album sold no matter where it’s sold from.
Thia makes sense to me. I guess I was thinking that Amazon’s cut would cause the overall cost in increase not the band’s cut would be larger to equal the amazon overall price.
I have no exposure to any musicians so I was asking a pretty broad question but mainly thinking about purchases; not Pandora.
I ended up going with amazon since once I got on the site since I kept finding books and cds I wanted and the shipping turned into a bigger deal.
A lot of metal bands I know make more money from shirt sales than from cd or download sales, the markup works better for them. I’m not sure how true this is in other scenes where there’s not such a culture of always wearing band tees. It’s also worth bearing in mind that the vast majority of musicians have day jobs, and are lucky to cover the cost of recording or gigging, let alone profit from it.
