Music Downloads: CD Baby vs Tunecore

CD Baby logo
vs
Tunecore logo

If you are in the market for a web solution for selling digital downloads of songs, good luck to you because it's a pain in the ass! If you really do need to make it happen, there are two great options for allowing web users to buy music online: CD Baby and Tunecore.

The rundown -

CD Baby charges a one-time fee of $35/album and takes (along with the service they syndicate to, such as iTunes) 9% for each purchased track (so, someone buys a $0.99 track and you get $0.63).

Tunecore charges $19.98/yr per album (that's a recurring fee) plus one-time fees of $0.99/track. But, they give you 100% of the royalties after iTunes or whoever takes their cut.

Here's a great article on CD Baby vs Tunecore for digital distribution. The gist of it is you'd have to sell more than 370 downloads to do better with Tunecore than CD Baby.

CD Baby pricing is here.

Tunecore pricing is here.

My recommendation is to go with CD Baby if you need to sell both physical CDs and audio downloads. That way you only have one service to deal with for getting paid for both physical CDs and digital downloads. If you want to do your own physical CD sales and ship them out, go with CD Baby for downloads unless you think you'll sell more than 370 downloads, in which case you should go with Tunecore for downloads.

There are other options for physical and digital goods musicians tend to see. Check out:

Big Cartel (store for physical goods - you fulfill the orders)
RAWRIP (digital downloads - no fees, 100% pay-out to the artist for sales made, sells through their store/widgets...)
SongCast (digital downloads)
Pump Audio (music licensing)