An Indie Alternate to Apple's Music Store
Now, I'm as impressed as the next person is by Apple's success with its Music Store legal digital music system. But it has its share of flaws, the most glaring one being that indie music has no voice there. Or maybe its that the money generated does exactly what money generated by a CD purchase does. Except there's another hand in the pie, Apple's, and the share that the artist who actually came up with the music gets a smaller share than before.

And while this system may make the fat white bastards who run these companies happy. I mean now they can afford to get two prostitutes to spank him with baby oil infused whips now instead of one. But the problem is that the fundamental flaws of the music industry's greed has not been checked at all. They still take far, far more than they should be allowed to and the creator of the art still gets shafted.

And also, the Music Store has plenty of bad mainstream crap but I defy you to find some underground music there. And live music is one of the coolest things about setups like Kazaa and Limewire. The chance to get your hands on some live sets of your favorite artist collaborating with other artists. Like my copy of the Rolling Stones and the Beatles singing Drift Away. Or any of another dozen or two live covers I've found online.

With that in mind, Mr Mark Morford has provided an alternative in CDBaby. From their site (which isn't a download site but ships out actual CD's): in a regular record deal or distribution deal, musicians only make $1-$2 per CD, if they ever get paid by their label. When selling through CD Baby, musicians make $6-$12 per CD, and get paid weekly.

And their system is working, check out their current sales numbers and distribution numbers.
* 36,951 artists sell their CD at CD Baby.
* 450,232 CDs sold online to customers.
* $3,492,522.53 paid to artists.

Although the numbers get a little less impressive when broken down. Each artist has sold an average of 12.18 CD's and each artist has generated an average of under $95 at an average payout of $7.76 per cd. Still, not a bad way to do business and it seems to be working. Given their numbers before, the average income for an artist would be about $25 for the same material. So its working. And no one's getting rich off of someone else's labor.

And people are getting their hands on some truly innovative music, not the computer generated pop filth that the RIAA built their skyscrapers upon.