SongCast Now Serving Indie Music To Five Top Web Outlets

If you’re part of the indie music scene, you’re often likely to hear that one of the best ways to get your digital media out to the virtual shelves of stores on the Web without much initial investment in distribution is to seek the services of CD Baby. The halfway house built to serve the long tail of the musical landscape represents a great many groups and solo artists and sells albums and singles through venues like iTunes, eMusic, Napster, and Rhapsody. All it requires is a $35 setup fee, plus 9% of any earnings from digital downloads. (CD Baby, as its name suggests, began its life selling CDs to various shops, which it continues to do and takes $4 per disc sold.)

Now, however, there’s a new distributor of digital downloads in the running. Called SongCast, it promises to deliver artists’ songs to a quintet of services. Indeed, that clearly results in far fewer consumer channels than are available through CD Baby. Yet it seems that SongCast is offering a connection to one reseller in particular that CD Baby does not list : AmazonMP3.

Of course, many independent musicians may find that CD Baby’s ties with iTunes plenty active. And some many even see SongCast’s limited reach as inhibitive, and thus not worth paying a $25 setup fee and a $5.99 monthly fee. (SongCast artists purportedly maintain 100% of royalties, and the service asks nothing for a UPC code, which CD Baby does to the tune of $20.)

But if AmazonMP3 is the primary market one is looking to serve more than any other, SongCast may be worth one’s serious consideration. It’s not a especially cheap option, relative to CD Baby. And music may not be served to dozens of unique channels. But each middleman has his strength(s). And competition has no downsides in the sales arena.