GRN: Whats up man?! Actually we got that direct link about 3 months after, but it was more or less empty. the itunes screen showed our album cover, but no songs or info. it wasn't untill a month later (and several complaints to CD Baby) that we got everything in working order, so we're still looking at 1 day shy of 4 months. when did you get yours up? I'm guessing it's taking longer and longer these days as everyone's trying to get up on that thing.
DAVIDK: Yeah we were very happy with Dave Collins (
http://www.collinsaudio.com/ ). He gave us a solid deal. we haggled a bit, but knew when he was offering us a good thing, so we took it. Since we did all of it through home studio, we were hoping that we could possibly make up some difference with the pro mastering, and he did that. there were tunes that he basically helped tame, and of course bring to "pro" audio sound levels. he did that all without compromising the sound. I'd posted a before and after up here (
https://homerecording.com/bbs/showthread.php?t=178699 sadly the link is not working, but you can at least see what people said...if you want, i can try and dig up the original files), and people seemed to agree that it was good.
Sales are going just fine! we blew through our original 300 pretty fast (granted we've had to give one or two away here and there, but that's maybe 20 out of the 300) and then we got a batch of 1000, so that'll keep us for a while. we also had promo CDs made up to send to radio stations (with two cleaned up songs for radio) and i think we sent out like 200 of those (all freebies and postage). Each gig we sell anywhere from 5-10+ (keep in mind the more we play, the more people who come have our CD) and make sure we get emails of everyone that wants to sign up at each gig (usually at least 10 - 20+ per show), but then again, we don't really push it the way we should (at the shows). Our real seller has ben Myspace.com (
http://myspace.com/bagoftoysmusic )...make sure you get up there if you're not already. As mentioned, we're now up on Itunes, which is nice cuz we can sell the tunes without all the packaging/mailing costs. Paypal and CD Baby have been good selling places as well. I'm not sure what type of music you've got, but since ours is kind of "surfy" i sent emails to a whole bunch of surf video production companies and offered our CD for them to use, and we've been fortunate enough to be used in maybe 8 videos on a prominent online surf site, and we've sold many CD through that type of advertising. so between cd sales and gigs where we can make anywhere from $200-$800 for like 2 hours, we're in the clear with like 900 CDs still around...which is pure profit. Everything's going well, and we're happy! Not huge numbers by any stretch of the imagination, but we'll sell at least 1 CD a day (on non gig days), and up to 10 or so on really good (non gig) days. you just never know what you'll get. We're just happy to be broken even, getting the music out there and we're saving up money for our second record so we can hit a real recording studio.