"Bands Flock to Do-It-Yourself Web Stores for New Revenue Streams"

As music increasingly becomes free, legally or not, bands are taking a two-pronged tack on the Web: selling products that can't be copied, and selling easily-copied music through simple user interfaces so fans don't defect to P2P networks if they find checkout and playback frustrating. Though tecent data suggest that digital sales are far from recouping CD losses (WID Nov 21 p2), for many smaller bands every little bit helps, and the Web has proven a low-hassle revenue stream. But a recently collapsed deal offers a cautionary tale.

Smaller bands' most stable revenue stream is tour- related sales. Cartfly.com is helping artists sell concert tickets and merchandise, such as t-shirts and hats, apart from the box office gate and the back table at the club. Customers use the do-it-yourself online store platform to create a sales destination, posting the code to their social networking pages and inviting fans to spread the code to their own Web pages and even to community forums.

About 40 percent of Cartfly customers are musicians, its original target demographic, President Bob Schober told us. The company, founded in summer 2005, released its flagship product this year. "Bands have never really made a lot off their record sales, unless you're Madonna," Schober said. "This gives them the opportunity to hit their demographic readily," apart from touring. More than 25,000 bands and artists have created stores. The average purchaser spends $25-$30, more than the company initially expected, Schober said: "They're not just buying smaller items." Several bands use Cartfly in conjunction with Snocap, among the better known do-it-yourself download store providers, Schober said. It also has a deal with PerfSpot, a social network focused on nightlife and music.

Schober spent a year "paying attention to everything e- commerce," to avoid competitors' user-interface missteps, he said. Bands wanting to sell items on a conventional social network would have to post each item one at a time and link it to a payment source like PayPal. Cartfly was designed to vest administrative control with the band. Additions, deletions and modifications automatically spread to every site hosting the store code, he said. The company's next hurdle is to reward fans for posting bands' codes, Schober said. Another project in "widgetland" is letting average users create their own mix-and-match stores, selling merchandise offered by a variety of bands, he said.

But the do-it-yourself space has its perils. CDBaby.com, one of the earliest music e-tailers, began talking with Snocap in 2004 about adding CD Baby's artist catalog to Snocap's P2P fingerprinting service. In 2006 Snocap changed its business model, amid contract negotiations, to powering artist stores across the Internet.