Musicians get new app to sell music on Facebook

CD Baby offers free application to make it easier for its members to sell to Facebook fans

One of the largest online distributors of independent music has officially launched a music-buying application on Facebook. CD Baby announced Monday that its MusicStore is now available for artists to integrate into their fan pages, thereby giving fans the ability to listen, purchase and share music with the app.

CD Baby President Brian Felsen stressed how big of a boon this Facebook integration will be with independent artists that are members of the Portland, Ore. company.

"We have all necessary artist content and information in our database, our new MusicStore for Facebook literally takes just 5 minutes to set up. It's beautiful, seamless, and integrated," said Felsen. "And I'm excited that artists are responding: in the first five days since our 'soft' launch, without any promotion whatsoever, we've already deployed over 1,500 artist stores! It's direct to fan, and CD Baby handles all the logistics: the credit card processing, the delivery of downloaded MP3s, the warehousing and shipping of CDs, the customer service, and the accounting - so artists can focus on what matters: writing, recording, and performing."

Monday morning marks the official launch of the service and will expose the whole Facebook community to more than 3.5 million tracks in the CD Baby catalog.

Up to this point, the CD service has sold more than 360,000 different albums and has led to artists receiving $157 million.

The MusicStore App is free for the existing CD Baby members to set up and requires no additional uploading since all of the music and artist content (such as songs and bio information) is already stored in the database. 

The company said that new artists, that want to add this Facebook service to their fan page, can go to their website and sign up for $39 to promote and sell a whole album and $9.99 to add a single to the catalog. Paying the fee to enter the CD Baby catalog will allow the content to go up for sale on all of the major music outlets CD Baby works with.

CD Baby content has already been available on the MP3 mainstays of iTunes, Amazon, Napster, and Spotify. 

With more than 850 genres listed on the site, the 14-year-old music company has grown into the go-to place for independent artists to easily sell their content. CD Baby also has sister companies that focus on web hosting (Host Baby) and electronic book distribution (BookBaby).

This announcement marks a huge step forward in Facebook's viability in music sharing and commerce and is the biggest add since Spotify joined the social networking platform a month ago and created as much excitement as it did waves.

With MySpace restructuring its claim to the music corner of internet marketing, this Facebook addition could prove to be a big push for artists to spend even more of their time promoting their Facebook presence.

CD Baby was not immediately available for comment.

Image Source -- Newrockstarphilosophy.com