Lessons

Lesson Info

CD Baby Setup - Part 1

Hi. In this lecture, we're going to talk about setting up your CD baby account. So, the first thing to do is to just head over to CD baby.com. And here you'll have two options. Sell and stream your music everywhere and discover new music. So what we're going to do is click on sell and stream your music everywhere. So we need to enter the artists site. Now we have another page here. So sell your music everywhere. And all we need to do is get started. Now, we can click on tell me more if you want some more information. But for this tutorial, we're just going to get started. And this next section here, we need to enter our contact details. So our name, email address, uh address as well, postcode and phone number. And then you need to enter your user name for logging in and then a password as well. So I'm just going to enter in this information. Ok. So once you've done all this scroll down to the bottom, you can always go through and have a look at the terms of service and the privacy poli...

cy as well. And once you've done this. Once you've entered all your details, check this box and hit save and continue. Ok. And now we go on to this payment information section. So I recommend filling this out because you might get some royalty payments. And if you scroll down, you can set your pay point. So please choose a pay point between $10 and $10, in whole dollars. So every Monday they send payments to artists when their account balance has reached this dollar amount. So I'm just going to leave it on the default of 25. So basically as soon as it hits $25 you will get paid, but you won't get paid until your account balance reaches $25. Ok? And going down here, we have payment fees. So there's direct to bank account check, paypal and Pioneer. So there's a few different ones you can choose. I recommend choosing paypal rather than direct to bank account because it's a little cheaper. And yeah, I haven't really used a check in a very long time and I don't really use Pioneer very often, but it's up to you. I do like paypal. I use paypal quite often. So I'm going to choose paypal. Then here you'll need to enter your paypal email address and then hit save and continue. Ok. And now we can choose what we want to sell or release. You can either choose album or single song. You can also download the Get started guide for helpful tips on the submission process. So you can click on this if you want to download this guide and this will give you more information on the submission process. So here we have a guide about the submission process. So we have a submission type CD Baby pro publishing or CD Baby Standard. And what we need will all be covered in the CD baby standard. So I do recommend going through these steps if you want further details right now, I'm just going to go on to album and release an album and here we have a few different options. The recommended one is the pro publishing. I'm going to choose the standard. The standard is a little bit more inexpensive. However, the pro will allow you to collect some performance rights and publish some royalty collections, song registration and also a mechanical royalty collection. But for what I want, I'm just going to use the standard one. There is the free one. This will only allow you to sell it on CD Baby and sell on your website and Facebook, which is not really what I want. I want the global music distribution. So I'm going to choose this one here, which is standard. It will cost you $ but it will allow you to distribute your music globally. Ok. And now we have some basic album information. So is it a compilation album? Yes or no for this? It's no, this is original music by me. Album language English artist name Thomas George. Album title vocal release dates. I'm going to choose the down releasing this which is May the 16th record label. If you leave this field empty, we'll fill it in artists names. I'm going to leave this empty because this is going to be published under my own name, not under a record label. Copyright owner. It's the same again. The copyright owner is me, the record label. I guess it's me. So I'm going to leave these both blank and here we go. How do you want to sell your music? So for this, it's going to be downloads, it's not going to be physical, it's going to be downloads. Ok? And going down, we have barcodes. I don't actually have a barcode for this. All I have is the music and the artwork. So I'm going to have to purchase a barcode. It will cost $20. Unfortunately, there is a cost for this. Ok. And then we have terms of service. I recommend going through and reading all the terms of service and once you've read all the terms of service, just check this box. I read, understood and agreed to the terms above and you have to be at least 13 years old and then enter your full legal name and here I agree. Ok. And now on the next page, you need to enter how many discs or volume your album comprises of. So for this, like it says here for most artists, the answer will be one. But if you're releasing a double album or a box set, please tell CD baby how many discs there are? So for me, this is just one and then I'm just going to hit next. Ok. And now we get to a number of tracks. So for me, this is six tracks, then we also have the track titles. So I've written out the track titles here as well. And then all you need to do is hit save and continue. And in this next page here, we will need to go through and actually add some additional information. For example, songwriter and publisher details. I've done this for the first two tracks already, but for the third one going to click on this here and then we can go through and choose the artists names, parental advisory. There is no explicit lyrics. So no language of lyrics. Is English. Is this a live version? No composition type? This is a original composition. If this is a cover song, you will need to have a license for the cover. There are agencies like louder or easy song licensing that help you acquire the proper mechanical license. So you will need to go through here. There might be some additional costs and you might not be able to acquire the proper mechanical license. So if you do have a cover song that you wish to submit. I do recommend having a look through louder and easy song licensing first, but this is a original composition. And here I'm going to choose the songwriter. So the songwriter here was Thomas George and also Peter Darling, and also Lizzie Joyce and going down. So Lizzie does not have a publisher for vocal, which is the song, Peter does not have a publisher for this song and I do not have a publisher for this song. So I'm going to hit save and return to the track menu and then I'm going to fill out the details for the rest of these as well. Also, I might add that if there are no lyrics, you can choose no lyrics and also say if you want to remove a songwriter, you can just click on this little X button here and this will remove the songwriter. And if you want to add the songwriter again, you can just click on add to this track or if it's a new songwriter, you can hit add new songwriter. So for this track, it was just me who composed this, who wrote the song. So I'm just going to hit add to this track and then I do not have a publisher for this song. So hit no and save and return to track menu. OK? So the information for these tracks have been added. So I'm just going to hit continue and here we have choose which type of preview, you would like to provide for playback of your album so you can have clip or full track. I'm going to choose clip because this is for CD Babies Web store. If I have the full track, maybe people won't buy it. But with clip, I guess they get a sample of the song so they know what the type of song it is, they know what it's like and then if they want to purchase the song, they can, then I'm going to hit continue. Ok, let's now have a look at album description. I just quickly wrote this, I am going to change this. I just put this in just as a placeholder. If you look here, it says when people are browsing the store, all they see is artist names, album cover and the short AM description. So make it good. So it's important here to have style of music genres and maybe even some artists you work with. So when people search for them or the genre of music, yours is more likely to come up. So I've actually created a better description here. So I say the name of the album and the genre of music and UK based producer, composer. And then I add in some of the other artists as well. So I'm just going to copy this and paste this in here, then hit save and continue. And then we have the album notes here, we can tell a bit more of a story about your music. But before we add this in, I'm just going to have a look at the CD baby top sellers. So this is store dot CD baby.com/top and let's just have a look at a few of these. So you can see here he has the genre of music type of music. It is. And if we scroll down, it has some more album notes so that if you hit, read more, there's a bit more of a story with some information about the artists and then a bit of a story about the band as well. So this guy has done a really good job and we want to make sure that people can find our music on CD baby. So it's a good idea to go through and spend some time writing your album notes as well. This is a placeholder that I used before. So I'm just going to delete this and then I'll show you the album notes here. So I'll talk about the co writers, I'll talk about the story of how and why we wrote this album. And we talk about some of the sounds, some of the instruments, some of the equipment, the lyrical theme and then the production. So I'm just going to copy all of this and then add this here as well. So it's a lot of description here, makes it a bit more interesting and hopefully it will help with the seo or the search engine optimization on CD baby. So now I'm going to hit save and continue and then we move on to the next section. OK. And now we're going to have a look at genres. So here we can select some different genres, can have two genres and the mood and style. So for this one, I'm going to choose avant garde and subgenre, I'm going to choose electronic avant garde. And then below again, I am going to choose avant garde again and subgenre, I'm going to choose electroacoustic and we have mood style. And here we have a few different ones for this. I'm going to choose dreamy. So it really depends on what type of music you have. It's quite interesting that we have sub category as well as main category and we can choose two different genres. Then we have artist location for me. It's the United Kingdom. So I'm gonna scroll all the way down to United Kingdom, just England Yorkshire. And here we have famous artists. You sound like OK, this is optional, but I'm going to add a few artists here. Ready hats and Tom York, who's also the singer of Radiohead, and I'm going to leave the third one blank and then I'm going to hit save and continue. And here we have pricing. So how much do you want to sell your digital album for on CD Baby? So I'm just going to leave the default of 999 and you'll notice you get paid 9.0909. So obviously, they did take a small commission and then if people want to buy the tracks individually, I'm going to choose 99 cents for each one. It make a bit more sense if the album was a similar price to the amount of tracks because there are six tracks that adds up to be a little under $6. So I'm actually gonna change this to 599 because it is a six track album. If you want as well, you can just sell the album and you can't sell the tracks individually. I'm going to allow people to buy the tracks individually or to buy the album for 599. Ok. Next is ISR CS which is a unique identifying code for each song on the album. So I don't have one if you have your own, you can slap that, but I don't. So I need CD baby to assign my ISR CS. So I'm going to hit save and continue. And the next option is digital distribution options. So, so here we can choose digital distribution option for your album. So this one, I'm going to choose the default which is download streaming service. So it includes all download partners plus services like Spotify, deser and more. And if you do not want to sell your music to a specific company, Uncheck A box, I want to sell it to all of these companies. So I'm just going to leave them all checked, then I'm going to hit save and continue. Ok. And the next page is extended track pricing for digital partners. So one thing before we continue is if you set the price for say 99 cents per track for sites like itunes, people will be able to purchase these tracks for 99 cents. But it will also be available on streaming sites such as Spotify or Amazon music, unlimited. So this page here. Do you have any tracks that are 10 minutes or longer? I do not. If you do it. Yes, then there will be a few more details you will need to fill out. But for this, I'm gonna hit. No. Ok. And now we have territory restrictions. So I want to sell my music everywhere. So I'm going to leave all territories and countries or we can choose specific ones. I'm going to allow anyone worldwide to listen to it. So I'm just going to hit all territories and countries make sure this box is checked and hit, save and continue. Ok. Now we have another option which is youtube, Facebook and Sync licensing. So for this album, where would you like your music to earn additional money? I'm actually going to opt in for all monetization options. So I'm going to select them all and if you don't want to do this, just deselect this, but I want to opt in for all of them. So I'm just going to select these and hit save and continue. There will be some more terms and conditions here. So make sure you read through these and hit the chat box if you agree with them and hit save and continue. OK? And then if you selected the youtube monetization, you'll notice, you'll get this youtube conflict notice. So when you upload to youtube, this is basically CD baby collecting your monetization. But it also says here, you will keep 100% of your rights. So if you agree with this here, I agree and continue and now you can submit the artwork. OK? So thank you for watching this section all about uploading to CD baby. In the next section. We're going to have a look at artwork.