It's not exactly like
waiting for my very first CD to arrive when
I was 20... but then again, what is?
Nothing trumps the teenaged dreamer. Man, it
was a thrill though - this video (with a
kitten J-Dog!) is precious as hell to me...
back when having 1000 CDs pressed was a big
deal, and really, really expensive...
(bwahahaha, the part in the video where I
open the box, remove the cardboard, and
there's another box is fuckin'
classic)
...this is the 21st Century
version of that I guess, and in some ways it's
cooler. Worldwide distribution in an instant. I will
make far less and spend far less (only $15 to put a
song up and I get 60¢ per download), but
I am officially on iTunes:
It's funny, I never even owned an
iPod until I bought the iPad for my iPad
Comic routine, so I had never touched iTunes... but it
is the entire music industry right now, and more than
trying to sell downloads? I just wanted my name
to pop up in iTunes if you searched for it. That alone
was worth the $15 to me. I also put up "Let Them
Drown" but for whatever reason, it's not coming up
yet. Strange, since Naive Again showed up 3 days ago
and I put both of them up at the same time. For
those wondering how I did it, I chose
CDBaby.com.
You can't just upload directly to iTunes, you have to
use middle-man sites. A bit of a racket, but Apple is
smart to do it this way, because everyone wins - and
then... no one is trying to take out iTunes. As for
where to gi, it seems it's between CDBaby.com
and Tunecore.com as far as the best ways to go about
getting your stuff on iTunes. Tunecore gives you a
slightly bigger cut of each download (70¢ vs.
60¢) but charges a yearly fee of $10 per song.
That may add up for me, so I just went with
CDBaby.com.
Also, CDBaby.com
puts your song on EVERY freaking possible site
for free, whereas Tunecore charges a buck per site.
CDBaby.com
will also deal with your physical CDs if ya wanna sell
those too. Pretty cool. I was also pretty pumped
that they chose one of the two songs I put up to put
on the front of their site...
Pretty cool, huh? Who know I could
get so many smiles for just $15? Heh. Oh and the
$15 comes from the whole barcode scam <rolls
eyes>. It's only $10 to put your song up, but then
you have to include a barcode which they'll assign you
for only $5 if you don't have one. I get it for
physical media, but sorry... that's just a scam for
digital downloads. There's already an
"ICSP" number assigned to it for free, so the
barcode thing is just a nice little hidden fee.
However, if you put an album up - it's only $40 and
$20 for the barcode. It's a better deal, which
I may do in the future... but this was just a way
to get me up there and searchable.
Doin' the math, I need to
sell 25 downloads to even break even, so chances
are... this won't make me any money - but again,
that's not the point. If I'm gonna play live, people
will want to put the songs I perform on their iPods.
Ya just kinda have to be available. Also, I've been
giving away mp3s for over a decade now... and it's
just kinda stupid. I don't think any of the people
I gave them to wouldn't have given me 99¢
for it, I just didn't have a system set up. Now
I will. Simple as that. Oh weird, I'm on Napster
already...
Who knew that site was even still
around? Crazy.
So as I said in the video...
99¢ isn't a lot of dough, but it would really
help me. I know the song is kinda tear-jerky...
but it's good to have a few of those in rotation. I
know my Tom Waits mp3s got worn the fuck out this
year. :-)
And look at that... we're at the
end of the year. One more entry before the big
year-ender (wow, also music related) and a celebration
forthcoming to mark the end of this horrible, rotten,
no-good, very bad year.
