Good to hear another artist having luck with CDbaby. I'll definitely be taking a good long look at them when I'm ready. There is another fellow on here, Linear Phase, who posted about another online distribution site that had some pretty decent rates. I forget the name but he posted a link in the Coffee House. If you google my username with his and Coffee House Cakewalk it'll come up somewhere in the jumble. Better than using the forum search which is horribly broken. 

My personal opinion (and what I plan to do when I finish my album) is unless you have the backing of some serious money behind you, don't even bother trying to sell your music. The most important thing is a fan base. Without that, you have nothing. No-one wants to pay for a band they have never heard of and won't just pick up a cd and buy it just like that. If it's FREE however, you might have a bit better of a chance. I figure distribute it free, and get your friends to tell their friends and their friends about it. Get a fan base. Once you have that, you can go to a record and say "look at all these potential customers out there ready to buy my products". Then they want you. If you got no-one they couldn't care.

Or you get lucky ;)

That's my 'average musician' pessimistic take on it anyway!

Well $1000 is decent startup capital for a tour which is usually the most effective way to build your fan base but I don't think the OP is interested in gigging. Low budget touring kind of sucks anyway unless you're a healthy young dude.

Again though you need an agent to set up the gigs and get your guarantees. Getting stuck in the middle of butthole nowhere because you ran out of money is brutal.

I agree with the fan base idea. If you are playing live.... hopefully you have been collecting email addresses and setting up some sort of communication path to your fans... 

As a small time, limited budget, artist, selling to fans is the best way to go. It take huge budgets for marketing and advertising to sell CD's to the masses. 

This is where creative thinking and figuring out how to create the buzz about your product and music is most critical. The internet is a good resource and way to get it out.... BUT, everybody and their brother is also using the same tactics.  How can YOU stand out from the crowd? I'd look back at that fan base and live gigs.... sell the CD's at the venues and other merchandise too...and build that email fan base.... 

good luck. 

thanks for the feedback guys. a lot of good thoughts. i've been around a long while though with my other musical projects, and have done the building the fanbase thing (my email list is in the multiple 1000s), and have done lots of kinds of promotional opportunities and sold a bunch of cds (although like mattplaysguitar said, for the most part, no one cares about unsigned unknown artists).

unfortunately my new project is electronic music and i won't really be touring or anything like that but i still want it to be heard. press and airplay on web based radio and podcasts (basically exposure) is what i want most out of it. so i'm looking for paid websites and services worth using to help gain that kind of exposure.

obviously i have a very different road ahead of me than most bands. my old comedy-hiphop projects it was easy (well not easy in the sense that we made it HUGE or anything haha, but easy to know what to do)... we did shows, we got a little press, we worked the social networks. we got heard, we got fans, we made some sales. but this is different. it's just me and the internet basically. i've been collaborating with a lot of film makers and game makers to make some experiences that tie into the music. but again, THOSE need to be found too. so that's why promotion is the main thing i need once this project is ready, and i'm just trying to figure out who/what/where offers the best ones worth paying for.

You know what you could do is start hunting around for folks who do webcast radio shows and toss them some tunes. Just like college radio stations were a great in for a lot of us not so knowns. In fact... contact some college radio stations too.

This thread is actually getting my brain moving in the right direction too. I've always been bogged down by other dum dums with weird ideas about how this type of thing should be done. It'll be nice being free from those shackles.

Cripes... I just repeated what you said. Yeah, man... you know what to do. Just spend some time every morning while your having some coffee or whatever scouring the net for places to shoot your music to. 

Still good to have a promo pack though.

Oh and compilations are another great way to get your stuff out there. Pick a couple of your best tunes and see who's putting out stuff in your genre. 

Haha yea, I think web radio shows are a big thing, especially for my genre (electronic or more specifically electronic new-age). Gonna just have to start really putting in work gathering names and places. Compilations is a good idea I hadn't thought of though. I mean I've had my music included on compilations in the past, but they're always local and now that you mention it, I haven't really looked into the possibility of getting on other compilations.

I'm glad this thread is getting some hits. I mean there's not really a lot of information out there for people in this situation. It's either "you have ZERO dollars so go start a facebook and do some local shows and get your buddies to share it" or "you have investors looking to fund big professional music videos, a tour, ads and etc etc etc, so here's a list of things to spend tons of money on" ... what about someone who has a healthy but small little pile of cash to spend on getting him (or her)self heard?

i'm aiming to have my press pack together by the end of January. album done by the end of February and hopefully first video ready by then too if some of the collaborators I've met come through... or if i figure out a cool, unique, cheap but cool concept I can do myself.

anyone else with any ideas please continue to post and whatever i think of i'll post here. honestly my main reason for starting the question in the first place was to hopefully find out about some paid-for services/companies/websites that are worth giving a little chunk of my money to help get me some exposure. there's so many of them out there, it's hard to decipher which would be worth the money and which wouldn't.