CD Baby Review
When you’re starting out trying to make a name for yourself in the music production world, you’ll need to spend a lot of effort, time and resources to get your sound out into the world. The internet is a great tool for sharing and communicating but it comes with it’s own challenges. CD Baby is one web service designed to solve these issues. I’ll talk about the pros and cons I found with using with this service in this quick CD Baby review.
What is CD Baby?
CD Baby is a content distribution service designed to give musicians and music producers the reach they deserve. The service itself is a popular place for people to look for new music and find new sounds and artists. The site also attempts to help users find your sound through staff recommendations. So if your sound is good enough you can expect some work to be done for you. Some being the focus of that statement.
Essentially CD Baby is an opt in Record label, and manages distribution, sales and royalties of your music so you don’t have to worry about chasing down scouts and running demo pitches. CD Baby will indiscriminately distribute to its large collection of well known and used digital partners; like iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, Amazon, Pandora, and many more. It puts you on way more markets and sites and has 30 partners.
I will point out an additional partner, a sleeper network deep in the list, iHeartRadio. As a sound engineer I’ve seen a major move in the industry. Large media companies across the world are starting to use iHeart as their distribution for online radio streaming services. It’s starting to become a service they have to be a part of or they’ll be left behind. Stations across the world are starting to advertise iHeart to their listeners as part of a promotional agreement they have to satisfy. So being on iHeart is a good place to be as people listening in their cars start to get the message and check it out.
Members Fees and Earnings
It’s pricing structure is geared towards smaller underground artists due to it’s percent of sales setup. The bigger you are and the more you make, the more you have to pay CD Baby. When you’re small this percentage beats out other competitor sites like Tunecore which charge large recurring fees. If you start making more than $1250 in a year off a single track or album I’d start to look at putting that high earning work on a different distribution service
CD Baby Distribution
In exchange for a percentage of sales CD Baby gives you the reach a record label usually would. With anyone able to opt in, it’s definitely an easy route to get your tracks and albums out to the world. It’s a go to option for upstart artists or first releases. CD Baby gives potential fans access to you. They give a free addon called Sync licensing which allows you to license your songs as well, allowing content creators to use your songs in their commercials, tv shows, games, movies and youtube channels, all of which properly pay you for your work.
CD Baby is a bit of a lame duck when it comes to promoting music and artists. Where a regular record label will do the work and spend the money to promote in order to get a return on investment CD Baby doesn’t care, they only earn if you earn. Your music will end up in new release lists, sounds like categories, and suggestion algorithms, but that’s the extent of CD Baby’s promotion. Meaning all the work falls squarely on you. Which could be really good for you or really bad for you. But this all depends on how well you can guide new fans to find your work.
How to Become Better at Promoting Yourself on CD Baby
If you’re really serious about wanting to start selling your tracks, beats and albums, I highly suggest you take a look at this course. It runs down all of the things you need to know to navigate the industry. On top of that it has rock solid tips on how to make your sound stand out and be exactly what content creators are looking for. Letting you really flourish on sites like CD Baby and Tunecore, especially with their sync licensing content creator access.
CD Baby’s hands off promotion does come with perks for new artists though. It comes as a strong alternative to regular record labels. With the ease of joining, the ease of distribution and an extremely fair percentage cost to use their service. If you work smart and hard you can definitely build a life off your passion.
