Release Time! Ep. 03: CD Baby

Continuing our series on releasing your music, we’ve talking about CD Baby, who’s more of a legacy digital distributor at this point. CD Baby was an early pioneer in package deals that offered CD production combined with digital distribution to the iTunes music store (remember that!?)

Nowadays, as a mastering engineer, this is not a digital distribution provider I usually recommend. Here’s several reasons why.

They take a percentage cut of every sale.

Any digital distribution service does 95% of their work for you just one time: when you hit that submit button to push out the release. That’s when they send your files off to whatever platforms you’ve chosen: Spotify, Apple Music, etc. And, this is automated on the backend, so often there’s no human involved.

In this context, taking a cut of every sale forever when you’re performing a one-time automated service, is a pretty unfair deal for you as the artist. Don’t work with businesses that aren’t treating you fairly.

They only accept CD quality audio files (i.e. 16-bit, 44.1 kHz).

This might have been an innovative practice in 1998. For at least the last 10 years it’s been standard practice to record digitally at 24 bit, even at home, and you can see sample rates getting into 96kHz and beyond.

This does make a noticable difference in sound quality, particularly when it comes to streaming. You always want to give the streaming service as high quality a file as possible, b/c they’re going to be compressing and transcoding it further, so you can listen on your phone from anywhere.

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So, with CD Baby you’re giving a corporation a cut of every single sale and stream of your music, for a service with lower audio quality and no human involved.

Not exactly a win-win.

Luckily we have better options! Like Distrokid!

P.S. If you support us on Patreon, you get access to a bunch of special discount codes, including a discount on your Distrokid subscription!