| CD Baby DIY Musician Podcast |
 Nov. 13,
2008
Ep.38 : Pandora Radio
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| Pre-Paid Cards for Indies |
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| posted by jd on Wednesday October 10 2007 @ 09:38PM PDT |
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Is there a source that offers pre-paid cards like i-tunes/starbucks
to indie artists.
We are already signed into the i-tunes system but CD are going
away and a digital card to customers would be great for replacing
cd sales.
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THIS IS A GREAT IDEA!!!!
Like the starbucks "song of the day" cards...
Indie artists could give away itunes free song cards,
to promote their album.
And the artist would have to pay for
a. the actual printed cards
and
b. the song being downloaded at cost, (60cents ?)
If this service is made available it will be great promotion at first,
once the millions of indie artists are all doing it it will probably
get played out. But the idea of this is really exciting.
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Yes, these itunes song cards would be a perfect promotion tool. I
am also just thinking about to use them as concert tickets as well.
Imagine you buy a ticket for a show in advance and you can
download one song for free ...
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Yes, I agree that it would be great if CD Baby would do a promotional iTunes card like Starbucks for artists to give out as business cards. To those of you that miss packaging, you could also really dress it up.
Derek, any possibility of doing this?
Monty
http://www.dimensionzero.com
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There is a service called Fizzkicks that does this. Not sure how
established they are but it's a great idea. They have a
website...hopefully I got the name right. Anyone else heard of
them?
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www.dropcards.com
All you need. :)
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Dropcards doesn't work with iTunes. We need something for iTunes since iTunes sells all the music around here.
Monty
http://www.dimensionzero.com
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I use Fizzkicks.com for my music download cards.
The service is good and they even design the cards for you or you can use their music card builder.
They have a lot of options.
http://www.fizzkicks.com
I think they also have the best band profile pages
www.fizzkicks.com/mindstrap
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| by jb
on Friday November 02 2007 @ 10:40PM PDT [ reply | parent ] |
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I think that discrevolt.com is a great idea, so I signed up. However
when my cards arrived the print quality was very poor even though
I offered my artwork in a 300 dpi tiff file. Because of the poor
quality I decided not to even try to sell them and haven't used their
service. Has anyone else had experience with them?
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A perfect solution would be if CDBaby could offer pre-paid cards similar the way Fizzkicks.com does.
That would be a perfect all-in-one solution for us. And as digital music distribution will be more and more important that would be a good business solution for CDBaby, too.
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I can't really think of any services, offhand, that make CUSTOM oneshot download cards for iTunes. Fizzkicks appears to be much like dropcards in execution.
Honestly, why do you NEED iTunes? Say you buy nearly all your clothes at Old Navy. If someone gave you a gift certificate to the GAP, are you going to just not use it? No. At least, that would be pretty crazy if you didn't. People like free stuff, they'll go a little out of their way to get it, if you give them the opportunity.
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Fizzkicks is working well for us. Just started there service. Would be great Cdbaby launch into this service.
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disc revolt is cool, but our fans complain big time about the redemption process... it is very labored and difficult to import into itunes.
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I heard at CMJ that Disc Revolt let most of their staff go and their website hasn't been updated since August so I looked into Fizzkicks and Dropcards.
I liked Dropcards better since I could design both sides of the card (Fizzkicks gives all of their cards the same back) and with Dropcards they have a cool widget that you can place on your site rather than making people go to their website. They seem a little more pro than Fizzkicks too and do stuff with bigger bands. Super nice folks on the phone, good price, fast turnaround, can't complain. Most info can be found at dropcards.com.
Regardless, these cards are great ideas for indie artists.
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I stayed away from Fizzkicks since they offer visitors complete streams of songs. It's too easy to record the streams rather than pay for the download, and there are a lot of people who don't mind stealing.
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dropcards.com just got 'em made for my new digital only e.p. fast
turnaround and cheap.
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My suggestion: find someone to help you design the back end coding and do it for yourself. You can DIY the design, PVC cards, and the hosting with little to no difficulty. I've done it this way and had tremendous success; it's saved our label thousands of dollars in marketing and promotional costs. If you're all that interested in making it happen for yourself, you can send me an email at jmichaelstorey@gmail.com and I'll shoot you in the right direction.
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I have been using Fizzkicks.com and they have widgets where you can place your player on your own site. I have talked to the people at the company over the phone and their turn around time for my order was very fast. My band has been extremely happy with the service.
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I have been using Fizzkicks.com and it blows away all other companies trying to do what they do. we sell our music online from our fizzkicks.com profile page and our own page. We use ordered cards with custom front and back designs. They offer the ability to design front and back plus you can sell music online directly. I am a proplan member which is $9.99 per month. Being a ProPlan member all my music card orders are 25% off plus i can sell my music from any site with out having to pay a commission to Fizzkicks.com. Honestly, I have been really happy with the service and staff there.
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I just went to the Fizzkicks.com and I don't see a way for non-
card-holding-fans to buy music. Is that only an option that Pro-
Plan Members get, and if so, how can I see some of the Pro-Plan
Member pages?
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Jim sounds like a troll for Fizzkicks. No one talks like that.
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I placed an order with Fizzkicks a few months ago. The website didn't work and my cards peeled within a week or so in a van.
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I use fizzkicks and never had any problems with cards peeling. u using the Music Card kit stickers or preprinted cards?
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pre-printed. shit's bogus.
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Dropcards has them as well. They average about 60 cents per card after the set up fee. It seems to be expensive to give these away as I think so many of them may just be thrown out. I think posting some free MP3's on my myspace page has worked really well and I've been just sending out emails and telling my fans to go to my site and download my songs. The ones I have up are not available on my CD's so it may encourage more buyers.
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To bad CD Baby doesn't make a card system so people can use
those cards to download song/albums off of CD Baby. Im sure
every member of CD Baby would want to participate???
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Disclaimer - I'm the lead interactive developer for the tools at Fizzkicks.
I came across the link and thought it would be worthwhile to post up a response. I will not get into any discussion on which service is better (i'm biased, so it's not appropriate).
I will say that the service has made serious strides in the past few months, especially this month with the release of new Flex/Flash driven artist pages, a new interactive widget that lets you download straight through the player on your own site and some updates to the plans.
The system will now allow bands to sell music right online without needing to use the pre-paid cards.
As far as the card builder, I'm confident that nothing exists in the market place that is nearly as advanced as this application. We are going to be updating the builder to let you flip your card over and work on the back design in the near future, though this will be limited to the ProPrint option only. The sticker versions will have a standard backing.
Expect a lot more - especially with the admin section of the site (which is going interactive as well) and more widgets to control how you can utilize your content ... including video, photo, and single track music players.
Yea, there are a lot of services out there. We're just trying to make it as easy for bands to do what they want with their music. We are all very approachable and take every suggestion to heart.
Heck > I want all the interactive capabilities to be the best available, hands down.
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One more thing I might add.
The new service features include a credit-pricing scheme that works with all your media. The band can set the download cost per credit and can, obviously, set the number of credits/downloads that a music card is worth.
For Alice, you can also set your media (albums/songs/videos only right now) to be free, so that your fans can download without a card or needing to purchase anything.
Additionally, we implemented the ability for artists to upload snippets of their songs/videos so that we do not stream the full track or video. You can upload an entire album and also upload snippets for all the songs. When your fan purchases or downloads the content, they get the full version, of course.
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Drop Cards can solve this problem for you. I'm using them. http:/www.russaimz.com
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Hmmm... this sounds like a good idea. I won't use iTunes for this though. My web host provides me with 5400 GB of bandwidth per month and adds an extra 40 GB every week for free. That means I have more than enough bandwidth to support users downloading free tracks from my artist website. Then I could print up some Moo minicards with a username & password that will allow them to login and download a free track.
BTW - if you wanna try that yourself then I recommend using Dreamhost for hosting your website and Moo for the cards. Check 'em out at:
http://www.dreamhost.com
http://www.moo.com
My website was built using Drupal but anything that will let you create logins & passwords and apply security to certain kinds of content would do the trick...
Oyo
http://www.oyoempire.com
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I've been using Discrevolt.com for the past year+...we use the cards a few different ways:
1) we sell them (tried at $10, but $5 works out much better)
2) we give them away as a promo (usually if you buy anything else at the merch table, we give you a card too)
3) they offered us a "widget" that we posted to our personal website and myspace...we havent used it yet but now apparently we can give out cards AND sell our music through or own website and myspace page. Will post back on this forum to let everyone know how we're doing in a few weeks.
...not sure what JB's experience was above ("poor card quality") but everyone raves about our cards :)...
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| NOTE: If you need a reply you should email CD Baby directly instead of posting here. We don't often read old message board postings, and have no way of replying to them!
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