My wife just picked up a a copy of the Wakefields CD on CDBaby, which operates out of Portland and sends out amusing confirmation e-mail, so it caught my eye when I saw a post by “someone who works there”:http://slashdot.org/~linuxbaby while I was reading a thread on Slashdot about how iTunes Music Store was more a more popular source of music than most illegal file-swapping networks.

I was impressed both by how much business they are doing, and by how much they pass through to the artists.

bq. iTunes More Popular Than Most P2P Sites

bq. My company [cdbaby.net] is one of the main distributors of music to Apple iTunes, Rhapsody, Napster, etc.

bq. I gotta admit that when we started doing digital distribution two years ago, I thought it would be just a small income stream for the musicians – some extra income, maybe $5k/month combined.

bq. But our checks from Apple et al have been over $300,000 a month so far this year! And that’s just for our catalog of mostly-unknown all-independent music. (And hey for the record, 91% of all that income goes directly to the musician.)

Also interesting are his comments on the unexpected role of “cover songs in online music sales”:http://cdbaby.org/stories/05/05/14/1931484.html