Snocap Followup: Clarifications and Answers

The folks from Snocap contacted me tonight after reading my previous post on the service to clarify some questions I had, so I wanted to take a moment to share what I learned from them with you.

• When someone wants to sell music through Snocap, they set a wholesale price, and then Snocap adds 45 cents to that wholesale price to come up with the final price of the track. If I wanted to sell one of my songs for 99 cents, then I’d set the wholesale price at 54 cents, and then Snocap would add the 99 cents to the wholesale price in order to make it 99 cents. An artist could set the wholesale price at 4 cents if they wished, which would then make the total price of the track 49 cents.
• The 10 cents/15% rule only applies to artists selling their music through a third party retailer, not to tracks sold directly from the MySpace (or MyStore, as they will be called). If you choose to sell through a third party (such as your website or blog or anywhere else besides the MyStore), then there will be a 10 cent or 15% fee (whichever is the higher number) tacked on. The artist still gets the entire wholesale price that they choose.
• I wondered about the 1000 tracks issue, and they clarified it: it’s not 1,000 tracks sold, but 1,000 actual songs. If you’re a small label releasing albums from four different bands, each with 5 songs, then that’s only 20 songs out of the 1,000 that you are allowed. Basically, this means that an indie band selling their tracks on the store will be able to do so forever (as long as they remain indie), because there’s no way anyone would be prolific enough to sell 1,000 songs in their career. Unless your name is Ryan Adams, at which point you would probably sell 1,000 different songs in four months. The next step up is for bigger indie labels or aggregators who sell tons of different bands.
• They only ask for a credit card for authorization to confirm your identity and to prevent identity fraud. They don’t charge anything, so that worry is alleviated.

All in all, I’m excited about Snocap. It’s a service that my band will be using to release our records for quite some time; although we’ll have distribution into every major online retailer through another service, we’ll still use Snocap to sell our tunes on MySpace because we have a large, dedicated following on the service and we want to make it easy for all of our fans and friends to buy our album. In the end, we don’t want to force people to use iTunes or another single service; we want to make it easy for them to buy the music the way THEY want to buy it.

Snocap looks to be a great option for the thousands of artists currently using MySpace to distribute their work and get some sort of monetary compensation for the music they create. The fact that they took time to email me personally after reading my blog post shows that they are dedicated to providing a great customer service experience, and I can’t imagine it not being a hugely successful venture.

UPDATE: Okay, folks…do NOT use Snocap. When they first launched (when I posted this email), they seemed like a great service. As time as gone on, however, I’ve seen thousands of artists get ripped off by them, and I  am wholeheartedly recommending that everyone stay away from them. Instead of using them to sell your music on MySpace, simply go through TuneCore and place your music on iTunes, and then sell them using a link to your iTunes store.