music sales

Hi all,

I just wanted to introduce myself. I've been an amateur musician for about 20 years and a professional programmer for about 10. I've been using Drupal for a year or so and have built a bunch of sites with it.

Now I'm building a site for my new band (I haven't been in a band since high school), and I've decided to do it with Drupal's multisite feature under a fresh install of a fresh domain. I'll be starting with some (or all) of the suggestions from http://groups.drupal.org/node/5167 and I'll try to report my findings here.

Just raising awareness about digital distribution options...TuneCore is a music service that claims to charge a one time fee per track or album to get your music on iTunes and other digital distro networks. What seems unique about the service is they say they don't take percentage fees from the sales...that is - what iTunes gives them, they give you. Like all of these services, research their terms and conditions before signing up!

There are essentially 3 choices:

Drupal driven digital warehouse & preview site with voucher based music sales

use Drupal as a complete music "warehouse" & shop + sell vouchers that can be used to buy songs. Which is the model used for the excellently done projectopus.com

Drupal driven digital warehouse & preview site and using the ecommerce suite of modules for paid downloads

use Drupal as a complete music "warehouse" & shop + sell music using the payment gateways that come with the ecommerce suite modules.