Update: I just spoke to them and they are now saying it should roll out in December. I have an inquiry in to Amazon as well.

Hi Chelsea,

From speaking with indiehitmaker.com, my understanding was that they offer you the ability to sell music in venues and get those reported to soundscan. And according to them, in December they will be launching a new service that allows you to report sales made on your own website. That said, in October they told me it would be November, so we'll see

If it was me, this is probably how I would do it.

1. If charting was important to me I would pick one platform that reports, probably CD Baby, and then tell people to send me their order number after ordering to get a special bonus. I'd place the bonus at the top of an upsell sales letter. CD Baby also passes email addresses so I'd probably manually add people to my customer list and use the welcome email to send out an upsell pitch. Then, once the main activity was over, I'd scrap that set up and just take orders through my own site.

2. If charting wasn't important, I'd just keep things simple and take orders myself using my won shopping cart.

My personal opinion is that there is much more profit potential taking orders yourself. Both because of lower fees and the upsell potential.

A final solution might be to contact every distributor you can, starting with CD Baby, and ask if they would be willing to just handle order fulfillment and soundscan reporting for the same fee, but as a drop shipper. In other words, you would mail them the paypal order receipt and they would ship for the same fee. That way you get to take the orders, but they get the same amount of money. This may take some creative thinking and negotiation. There are quite a few distributors who report to soundscan, and I'd think that someone would be interested in the money.

Portmerch.com was who we used on Janiva Magness's release and they helped with some of that stuff, so you might have some luck there. 

Hey Chelsea,

You could just sell through CD Baby and then import, however each customer is required to tick a box saying the many to pass you their info (many won't). Each person would then need to confirm that they want to be on your list (many won't because there will be such a lag in time and no incentive), and this will greatly cut down on upsells because the moment when the purchase fervor is taking place will have passed. Still, it's doable.

I'd personally skip the focus on charting until you can find a distributor or indiehitmaker offers the service, which is supposedly soon. But if it's really important to you then yeah, you could do it the way you described.

As far as multiple channels, I'm personally not worried about it. Yes, you get additional coverage, but I think you'll find that as an indie, almost every sale you make comes from you hustling up the sale. So coverage by itself means little. For my next album release I expect that I will hold it back from all other retailers, including iTunes and only sell through my site. Then I will release it on iTunes and Amazon, and everywhere else a few months later, for that exposure, but with no real expectation of it leading to an increase in sales.

As for a store page on your site, you could totally do that. I think focusing on a single album helps focus attention towards that first conversion and moving people through your customer funnel, but I don't think it's a big deal and I can understand the desire to broadcast all of your work in one place like that.

Hope that helps