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Buy original-quality, digital music directly from your favorite musicians with a credit card OR PayPal account!
What is indieTorrent?
The indietorrent.org project provides an e-commerce framework that enables independent
musicians to sell their own music while keeping all profits. Artists may join the indietorrent.org community free of charge,
and are free to close their accounts at any time — no fine-print, no contract.
Our aim is to give artists total control over their own music and the freedom to sell their music in whatever manner they see fit.
At the same time, we give customers CD-quality (or higher), encryption-free music at prices that artists set.
Read more (lots more) in the indieTorrent Manifesto,
which contains a fairly concise Executive Summary, or simply read-on.
Why indieTorrent over iTunes, Amazon, Rhapsody, Napster, SNOCAP, CD Baby, etc.?
- We give artists the money they deserve: ALL PROFITS (~85% of each dollar). The more music artists sell, the higher that percentage grows.
- We actually show both artists and fans how each sale is allocated (% to artist, % to credit card processing, % to indietorrent.org).
- We offer FLAC audio files, which contain the original, CD-quality data from the physical CD. Most digital music stores offer the customer a low-fidelity file
(such as MP3 or M4A/M4P) to "cut costs". For convenience, we also offer MP3 and OGG versions of each purchased track.
- There are no contracts to sign; artists enable/disable/manage their own music catalogs and leave any time they like.
- Artists set their own song prices.
- Customers can purchase any number of songs from a given album; buying the entire album is not required.
- Artists can customize their storefront/profile pages; see http://indietorrent.org/vialka
and http://indietorrent.org/counterlaunch for examples.
Ten simple steps to selling your own music:
- You create an account. (Estimated time required: 1 minute)
- You request an Artist Profile, which allows you to sell music on indietorrent.org. (Estimated time required: 1 minute)
- We approve your Artist Profile request within 48 hours.
- You create a new album in your Digital Catalog and save the album details to our server. (Estimated time required: 2-5 minutes)
- You set your own price for each track on your newly-created album. (Estimated time required: 1 minute)
- You prepare the audio files to go with each track on your new album. (Estimated time required: 20-45 minutes)
- You upload the audio files for each track. (Estimated time required: 1-2 hours)
- We transcode your uploaded files to the MP3 and OGG formats, too, for customer convenience. We notify you when your files are ready for presentation to
the public.
- You set the status of your album to "Enabled". Your album is now visible in the indieTorrent Digital Catalog and in searches.
- Whenever your account balance passes the threshold you set in your Account Preferences (the default is $50.00 USD), we pay you the amount you are owed (you
choose: paper or electronic check).
Any time a customer buys your music, ~5% of the transaction total is spent on credit card processing and we keep ~10% to pay for the bandwidth required to serve
your customer his/her song download, provide customer service, and pay for web hosting/future site development. This leaves you with about 85% of each sale in your
pocket.
Other benefits of using indieTorrent:
- You can permanently delete your indieTorrent account at any time if you so choose; you are not under contract with indieTorrent.
- You can disable your own songs and albums at any time; disabling songs/albums removes the songs/ablums from public view and prevents customers from purchasing the
disabled music.
- We are working to give artists 100% control over their Digital Catalogs: fix track titles, replace/re-upload audio files, change album artwork/genre, and more.
- There is no way for you to owe us money — all services on indietorrent.org are provided free of charge. We only keep enough from each sale for indietorrent.org to
remain online (and we'll be posting all financial details for public review).
- If you are unable to encode your own audio for any reason, simply Contact Us and then mail us your CD; we'll do all the heavy-lifting for you (at no charge) and
notify you when your record is ready for the public to purchase.
How does it work?
E-Commerce is expensive, and not every musician can set-up his own secure web-server and offer for-pay downloads of his music. Instead, many do-it-yourself artists
turn to PayPal or Yahoo for an "out-of-the-box" solution. While less expensive than a custom e-commerce solution, these systems are typically clunky and
difficult to integrate with existing "brand imagery". Further, these systems are not designed specifically to sell digital music, and are often ill-equipped
for this purpose; most platforms allow only for physical products to be sold.
In contrast, the indieTorrent platform is designed specifically to sell digital music and downloadable DVDs. By taking a modest percentage of each sale (~10%), we're able to pay
for the entire operation: webserver/hosting, security certificate, bandwidth, customer care, maintenance, and future site development. This strategy avoids the
need for all of us to have our own business entities, merchant accounts, payment gateway providers, etc., which would constitute an astronomical expense. Instead,
we're all splitting the bill and running all transactions through a single gateway and merchant account. Using a billpay service, we're able to pay the artist
directly and no second "monetary transfer" charge is applied; the money goes straight from our checking account into the artist's.
It's this simple: if you are willing to put 10% of each dollar in music you sell through our website back into the indieTorrent community,
we'll give you your very own e-commerce store through which
to manage and sell your digital music catalog. We'll also provide customer care to fans who purchase your music, should they experience a problem of any kind with
their orders. That 10% will fund all site operations and ensure that this website and your music remain online and available to your fans into the indefinite
future.
News & Updates
Saturday, July 19, 2008
Posted by: Ben Johnson
First, we offer our congratulations to indieTorrent artist Ryan Lindsey;
his music appears on the American Teen movie soundtrack. Ryan is a one-man-show
that is not to be missed. Buy his record today! =)
For anyone that may have experienced an issue with downloading full albums
in the FLAC format, we've upgraded the server and hope to have resolved that issue.
In other news, check out Counter Launch's new custom profile template:
indietorrent.org/counterlaunch.
Friday, July 18, 2008
Posted by: Ben Johnson
We just uploaded dozens of updates and bug-fixes. We are fairly confident that all areas of
My Account are working as they should. Artists can now specify
a "Withdrawal Threshold", which is the amount that you'd like to let accumulate in your
account before we pay you whatever money you are owed. Visit the new Account Preferences
page to see how it works. (Obviously, this feature applies only to those with Artist Profiles.)
Last, but not least, you can now opt into our announcements mailing-list (no SPAM, no foolishness)
on the same preferences page.
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Posted by: Ben Johnson
We recently set-up a MySpace page.
We are now publishing direct links to each indieTorrent artist's album page
on our MySpace page — we won't be able to do this forever, so enjoy it
while the list is short enough!
We hope that you'll join us on MySpace: http://myspace.com/indietorrent.
Sunday, July 6, 2008
Posted by: Ben Johnson
We just published a new picture tutorial that walks the reader through the process of
preparing audio in the FLAC format on a Mac computer. You can find the tutorial under our
Help & Resources section.
Saturday, June 14, 2008
Posted by: Ben Johnson
We are working on a brand spankin' new templating engine that leverages
Smarty.
You can see this upcoming feature that is unique to indieTorrent
in action on Vialka's artist page: indietorrent.org/vialka.
Within a couple of weeks, all registered artists on indieTorrent.org will have the
ability to implement custom templates.
Would you or your band like to be featured here?
Then sign-up to participate in the hottest thing since the sun: the indieTorrent BETA.
Real music. Real money. Real fans.
Start by creating an account with us.
Are you a talented artist or programmer? A highly ambitious person?
Then talk to us about joining the indietorrent.org staff and be a part of the rising music revolution.
Staff members are volunteers at the present time, but your help will make our distribution
model efficient enough to pay all part-to-full-time employees! With real money (not peanuts)!
Contact Us today!
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