The Changing Face of the Music Industry

The music industry is currently in the midst of a major transition.  This transition has to do with the people who buy CDs and, resultantly, with the people who sell CDs as well.  More and more numbers of people prefer to purchase their CDs from online stores and websites as against conventional stores i.e. brick and mortar stores.  This major shift in preference is due to the way the internet has woven itself into the fabric of daily life.  The reason why more and more people are buying CDs from people who sell CDs on the internet is that online purchases provide more comfort and convenience along with the fact that buying online saves them a lot of money.

Establish Your Own Band Website or Web Page to Sell CDs online

If you want to sell CDs for money on the internet, the first thing that you have to do is establish your own website or web page.  It is also worth mentioning that you can sell CDs via your blog.  In order to sell CDs online, your website needs to be equipped with some basic features that would enable it to deal with the whole process of buying and selling CDs.  The foremost of these has to be a shopping cart, which you can acquire through a wide variety of means ranging from buying customizable scripts and software to just installing free but rigid plug-ins.

Creating a Payment System Which Will Allow You to Sell CDs online

Another side of installing a script or plug-in for equipping your website with a shopping cart is that it should have a payment system that is compatible to multiple currencies and multiple platforms.  The most obvious answer to a payment platform that would allow you to sell CDs is PayPal.  However, despite the fact that most people use PayPal to make their purchases, there are also other payment platforms that your shopping cart should be able to handle.  These include 2Checkout, Google Checkout, Trial Pay and Amazon Payments.  Most free plug-ins that you get would be able to handle PayPal but not other payment platforms when it comes to your efforts to sell CDs.  Hence, you should look to invest a small amount of money to have a script or software that allows your shopping cart to be capable of handling other payment platforms.  Even though the investment may seem a little bit too much initially to you, after a while you will see the investment paying dividends.

The Need for a Digital Delivery System and a Conventional Hard Copy Delivery System

When you sell CDs on the internet, you would need a method to deliver your CDs to your buyers.  This means having a delivery system.  There are two types of delivery system that you will have to put in place and both are required for different preferences that you may have.  The first is a digital product delivery system which you will need if you are looking to sell CDs in digital format i.e. downloadable.  The other is the conventional courier or mailing system that you will need if you are trying to sell hard copies of your CD.  Ideally, you should be looking to sell CDs in both formats because different buyers have different preferences.

Your digital delivery system to sell CDs needs to be automated or you will soon find yourself swamped in handling deliveries.  Moreover, when someone buys CDs online, he or she expects to receive the purchased product instantly as against waiting for it.  Hence, if you do not have an automated digital delivery system, you will find that your customers are not coming back for more or, even worse, giving you complaints for the same.  The best way to get an automated digital delivery system to sell CDs is to tie up with a third party website for setting up an auto responder wherein a mail with the download link will be sent to your customer as soon as he makes the payment.

It is very common for people to buy music from people who sell CDs on the internet and then share it amongst their friends.  Even worse than this is a situation where an individual buys your CDs from you and promptly shares it on some peer to peer network.  This means that if you are getting paid once, you are actually giving away your CDs many more times.  This, as is obvious, is not good for business which is why you need a way to protect your CDs from just being circulated to non paying people.

The only way you can sell CDs and protect them from being shared with other people is to install an automated digital delivery system that also protects your CDs from piracy and sharing.  There are many third party websites such as PayLoadz on the internet that provide these features in their automated digital delivery systems.  There would be two layers of protection in the automated digital delivery system of PayLoadz.  The first would be that the link for downloading your CDs would be generated specially for every customer and would only exist for a day or two.  The second would be that the music files in your CDs themselves would be protected against copying.

Using Third Party Digital Product Marketplaces as a Means to Sell CDs As Well As Market Them

Your marketing efforts would be important if you want to sell CDs for a long time to come.  The usual technique to market CDs is through videos on YouTube, free giveaways and search engine optimization strategies.  These work wonderfully, but you may want to consider using third party digital product marketplaces to increase your chances to sell CDs online.  Digital product marketplaces are online where people can sell anything that is downloadable, and established marketplaces almost always have a customer base ready to purchase such products.