CuttingOut the MiddleMan
Setting Up an Online Storefront for Your Music

Sure, iTunes is already on everyone’s computer and there are still lots of places to drop off your CDs for consignment, but nothing beats selling music directly to the audience, whether it’s in exchange for a cover charge at a club, across the merch table or even mail-order style. San Francisco mastering engineer at-large Mike Wells introduces us to the new version of face-to-face sales
— personalized online storefronts.

So you’ve entered the digital distribution marketplace. Through your digital distributor, your music (which is now a “digital asset!”) now appears in online digital music e-tailers such as iTunes, eMusic, and the like. What more can you do? The answer: Consider selling your digital assets directly online yourself, via Myspace or on your own website.

Why Sell Your Music Online Direct?
There are many reasons to consider selling your music direct from your website or MySpace page. Let’s run through a few of them.
First, you could feasibly keep more revenue for yourself by creating a direct-sale option to your fans and potential fans. Using your own site as a destination for sales could build momentum for your website and your band. It serves as a compliment to your digital distribution offering. You’ll be able to offer higher-quality digital assets (higher bitrate) than those supported by the digital e-tail marketplace (currently averaging at 160kps). You’ll have more control over special assets, one-offs, collector’s items and bonus materials through your music store, and you’ll be able to promote special offers at your music store tied in with upcoming shows or events.

Given this quick rundown of benefits, you can see just a few items to motivate you into researching this option.

Online Sales Tools
The most visible tool at the moment is the Snocap “MyStore,” which can be embedded into a MySpace page and additionally on an artist website. Snocap is free to join, and the code for MySpace/Website integration is provided by Snocap once your account is created. Another tool which allows more customization and options is the turnkey “1-2-3 Music Store” from EasyBe. This product costs roughly $70 for bands and requires some website coding knowledge to implement. While more complicated, a customized/integrated storefront into your website will give you a more professional look.

Which Approach Fits Your Band?
Creating your own digital asset storefronts offers you additional promotional tools and ways to reach your fanbase. There are, however, some things to consider when setting up one or more storefronts. For instance, consider the following list of questions:
What is your target market — MySpace searchers or established fanbase website visitors looking for special offers? What are the goals of your music store — sales, visibility, special offers? What do you wish to offer - special editions, singles, demos? What are the requirements of the service you wish to use? How much support you can handle — can you serve people asking compatibility questions and having problems with downloads they purchase from you and handle refund requests?

After answering these questions, consider the purpose of each site. While MySpace has established traffic, it is restricted in its layout options, whereas you have the ability at your personal website to integrate promotions for sale alongside the music store itself, along with controlling the design elements to ensure an easier customer experience.

What Formats Should You Support?

Which formats you offer to your customers will surely come into consideration. Some tools may lock you into certain formats (while Snocap supports MP3 and WMA, only MP3s may be sold through their music store interface, for example), whereas others may allow any format to be sold. So what’s the best approach?

MP3 — The current de facto standard in player support. While the top of the .MP3 scale is currently 320kps, most devices peak at 256kps. If you are planning to offer high-res MP3s to your customers, consider 256kps as your format.

AAC — While the MP4 format has proven its sonic superiority (in containers such as AAC, AC3, and MP4), its support is still dwarfed by that of the MP3 format. When considering this format, also consider how much support you wish to handle for questions on player compatibility.

Lossless — The lossless codec format also comes in a variety of formats. Apple Lossless, WMA Lossless (Microsoft), and also the popular open source format FLAC. The advantage of offering a lossless audio format for sale is fidelity. Lossless encoders perform only file compression, and imparts no audio compression upon the file. This results in a CD-quality compressed file. However, the file size is usually much greater than that of a lossy-encoded file. Furthermore, lossless format support in hardware players is currently limited and commonly proprietary (for example, the iPod only supports Apple Lossless), so offering a lossless format may not be the best choice for offering CD quality downloads to your customers.

How Should You Manage Metadata?
Information about a track, Track Title, Artist Name, Release Title, Album Art, is considered “metadata”. Along with the various codec formats (MP3, AAC, etc..,) there are various types of metadata initiatives, services, and filetype support.
There are a number of free metadata tagging applications available for free on the internet. When choosing a tagging application, it’s in your best interest to get familiar with the different level of tagging support offered by the application, and choosing a level you wish to author in. Look for a more in-depth discussion in the next installment, which will focus entirely on metadata.

Testing Your Store
While opening an online music store is now easier than ever, it is still imperative to test your offerings. What is the customer experience like (how easy or hard is it to purchase your songs) given the service you are choosing? Do your customers need to create an account with another service to purchase your songs? Can they use a credit card, PayPal, or either? How are the song files delivered to the customer? Will they be able to re-download them if they lose them? How easily can your song files be integrated into music software systems (iTunes, Zune, etc...)? The more you test, the more aware you will be of potential pitfalls your customers might experience, and the sooner you can put changes in place to offset a negative customer experience.

Offering Customer Support
As a result of your testing, consider compiling an FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) list to accompany your store offering and have a link to that FAQ predominantly displayed and readily available for your customers. This can be a huge time-saver and generate a happier customer experience overall. Common questions you may encounter would be things like: “I’ve purchased your songs from your Music Store, now how do I add them to my iPod?”

With a little creativity, web know-how and initiative, you can greatly enhance your digital asset offering to the ever-expanding music market. Stay tuned for more detailed discussions about managing the metadata on your files.