First Distribution is a good idea, but its a lot harder for a distrirbution company to sell an ep, versus a full album, I actually work for a small distribution company in Canada. Anyhow for example if you take 2 full albums and put them in a store shelf (by two unknown artists same genre) and one album has 14 songs, the other 12, the customer will probally take the bang for the buck .

a couple of avenues you can take, try some serious internet promo, any site you can find put links up to yours, forums etc.

get a myspace, and a purevolume site as well.

try to get your stuff on itunes and the other download sites

give away a couple of free tracks of your site,

as far as radio is concerned some radio play is better than none, NEVER discount college radio they can make or break independant artsts. Pick on all your local stations, and then send out to a managble number of stations in your country , and call them after you send the cds out.

The whole soundscan thing is only really a concern if your moving thousands of units, I would see if I could work a deal with distribution thru a few companies , maybe a couple small ones in canada and the usa, and then press some for yourself .

No one is going to help you make it happen you have to get it going yourself. I deal with a lot of artists and some just record there album and then basically throw sh** against the fan to see if it will spray. They sit back dont play live and expect the distribution company to make them stars it dont work that way.

my suggestion is do everything that you can , get your tracks to everybody you can !

-gil

yeah we have myspace, aand we get anywhere from 150-500 plays a day as is off our demo. We've been adding friends on myspace to try to get to 30,000 or so by the time the E.P. hits. We'll definately give a couple tracks away in mp3 format for people. We've also got some left over tshirts, we were going to do a little "promotion" thing where like, while supplies last, get a tshirt with the E.P. for only a dollar more.

I know we wont really see money from college radio play, but youre right, some is better than none. So i plan on hitting up indie stations and college radio.

I guess it sounds like, we should hold off on the soundscan ideas for now. I was under the impression that we could sell an E.P. for like, 6-7 bucks, if it has 5-6 songs on it, i thought that seemed fair enough. But then, i figure, we wont be seeing much money from that if we only sell something for 6-7 bucks. We are considering printing them ourselves, which i figured we could do for about, 50 cents (american) per cd, and sell them for 6 bucks, we would keep all the profit.

How would I go about getting a small distribution up in Canada?

As far as Itunes, i thought that we had to prove sales or something to be on there. is it as simple as just submitting our songs?

Thanks,

Chris

Hey Chris

I am unsure as to how the whole iTunes thing works, I know of a couple of independant artists who have there stuff up there. There is a lot of paper work involved, and If you have a lot to offer then I believe they are more interested (as far as titles go) Try it out, i think you have to create your own record label though.

The only problem with an ep as far as Distribtuion goes is, that a distributor sells the cds to retail for example, we sell to a retail store and charge them $11 or so a disc, then they mark it up to 26 , not a good thing for indie to sell a lot, and distributors will sell to distributors at like 4.5 a disc, so there is not a lot of profit margin for an artist, yah see.

LOOK UP festival distribution in Canada., they maybe interested.

and add me to your friends
http://www.myspace.com/blueshoundproductions

-gil

Hey I sent you a friend request on myspace. My band is Skidward.

I was searching around online trying to find out places to submit music and I came across a few sites that seem to make it more favorable to the indie musician. They're basically sites like, cdbaby i think it was....im at work, so i dont have the link on me. there was another site that looked particulary interesting, it had soemthing to do with itunes, rhapsody and napster. You pay 99 cents a song to them, and 7.98 annual storage fee for your music, and your sogns get places on those three download site and they dont take any of the money you would make from those downloading services. You basically just pay like, 8-20 bucks up front and theres no exclusivity agreement, they have no rights to your music either. I cant remember all the information. I bleive they said they would soon have other digital distributions for say, selling the cd.

I searched for that canadian distribution, but until the band has plans on touring up that way, its a no go for using them as distribution. I think that I'll explore teh indie friendly places I can find first and if that seems well, then start searching out possible other distribution channels.

Chris

Hey Vintage Sounds

I don't know if you would be interested or not but.........

I own a small online record company. By small i mean its not even online yet. Im still gathering songs for it.

I offer a service for people to list their songs on it, for free. I gain no money what so ever from it.

People can either listen to the track online or download it.

If you would like you track/tracks listed on the site. Please email at shortty@shorttyproductions.co.uk for more information.

Thanx

Another site I'd like to recommend is ...

http://www.audiocandy.com

At this site you are mixed in there with major label artist, example, i'm under Santana .. as Sanity Inn

I believe you keep a large percentage of revenues in single song downloads, and CD sales,
they have a few major online radio stations like Big Blue, and you have seperate charts for Independents and signed artist, aswell as combined chart,,

you can check stats onsite once joined, and your material will be auditioned before you can join this site,,

they renently attended the CES show and were asked to submit materials for all their independent artists to editors and labels like Rolling Stones mag etc,,

I think it's worth a look and a great site to expose yourself,,

also connections to labels here ,,

Hope link helps, goodluck with CD release..

SI

Sanity Inn,

Thanks for the info. Will be sure to check that out when our E.P. is near completion. i came across a site you may be intereted in also. Im at work, so I am trying to re call it. But it was basically a site that posts your songs on Itunes, Napster and Rhapsody. You pay like, 12 bucks annually, and then any monies received from downlaods on those will go 100% to you. they have no right to your music or anything. No hooks. You just have to front up i believe, 7 bucks to put an album up and something like, 1 dollar a song. thats it.

http:// <-- i think thats it. Check it out, let me know what you think.

Also, what do you think of places like cd baby?

Chris