You stated we didn’t quite understand how things work. That remove is quite untrue as we work in the industry and do the job daily so we fully understand the issues and do discuss often how can we make it easier for artists especially those who are doing it themselves without huge budgets. The post was merely to correct an incorrect assertion by another company who were saying untrue things and we unlike anyone also gave you the formula on how you deal with those issues rather than hiding behind closed doors. You have raised other points which although were not spoke about, are very true.

Putting music on any music store is not going to guarantee you sales. iTunes may still be the biggest platform in the world, but unless people know you are there, there who is going to find it except people looking around. There are of course new sites popping up that have tried to look at this and are successful developing really exciting ways for consumers to discover new artists. One site that comes to mind is Zvooq in Russia that has some really exciting ideas to deal with this problem.

The nature of distribution is that the distributor is just like the post man and delivers the content to the stores. The actual promotion to the wider world still lies with the label or artists themselves. PR and plugging is very expensive but again there are some systems out there you can buy into that are cheaper, but I don’t know if they would get the same results. In the DIY market the distributor could never offer this without huge fees or if a release was going down a more traditional route, then deals would be weighed against the artist rather than in their favour gaining the lions share.

It’s a very good point you make about some stores still not fully sporting classical artists even with just having simple fields such as composer. That is very sad really and needs to be corrected. There are developments underway that could correct that over time as more and more stores move to a delivery standard.

(1) It’s true that “it’s not just iTunes that sell classical music,” but that’s irrelevant. Most of us artists don’t want our music sold through only one online store — no more than we’d want our CDs sold in only one brick-and-mortar store. We want people to be able to find our music wherever they’re looking, whether it’s Amazon or Rhapsody or last.fm or some smaller distributor. And the fact is that iTunes is by far the biggest channel, and we certainly want our music to be available there.

So in short, you’re answering the wrong question. It’s not “where can I sell my music online?” Hell, I can sell it on my own site using Paypal, but I won’t get far that way. The real question is, “how can I make sure my music is sold reaches as many customers as possible online?”

(2) There are many services that provide an answer to that question, allowing you to upload your album to one place and then having the service send it to many stores. Those services are the problem here. Many of them — such as Tunecore, for example — arbitrarily refuse to accept anything with the genre set to “classical.” Others, for example, don’t provide a composer field in the metadata.

The particular PR campaign from Ditto that I believe you’re referring to is not just a PR gimmick. They have a point: “unlike Tunecore, we don’t have our heads stuck up our a**es.”

(FYI, I am not affiliated with any of these distributors. I did use CD Baby for distributing a CD once, with mixed results.)