Plaidophile

Right now, for physical CD sales, there is definitely no better choice than CDBaby. Their consignment rates are a little high ($4/CD) but still reasonable, and they have absolutely the best online storefront for this stuff. They're also always making deals with all sorts of different other businesses which make interesting promotional and distribution opportunities (most of them a bit silly and niche-y, but every little bit helps).

For digital distribution, CDBaby and TuneCore are almost equal, but I think TuneCore edges them out. CDBaby takes 10% off the revenue to pay for their costs, while TuneCore charges the artist an annual $20 fee. So, $200 in sales per year per album is the break-even point between the two. This certainly seems easy to hit for a band with wider appeal (my older stuff definitely isn't, but my newer stuff could be). The main difference between the two is that CDBaby offers some stores which TuneCore doesn't, but TuneCore offers a couple stores which CDBaby doesn't, as well (both offer the major players that are worth dealing with, though). However, they are certainly compatible — you can use both, and just tell CDBaby not to distribute to the stores TuneCore goes to as well.

Disc Makers' digital distribution doesn't look terribly useful, although it does have a cute feature where you can print and sell "download cards" at gigs, I guess for when you run out of physical CDs or something. I'm not really sure what the market is for that, though, and it certainly doesn't work for me (seeing as how I am primarily a studio musician and almost never gig, and don't even have a real-life band).

For manufacturing, it really depends on what you want. TuneCore's manufacturing is basically ancillary to their digital distribution, but their prices are very competitive with Disc Makers'. Disc Makers definitely provides a much wider range of packaging options, though. Fortunately, this area doesn't require any sort of exclusivity (unlike digital distribution) so it's easy for someone to try them both and decide which one works out better in general. Disc Makers' process is pretty fidgety (at least for short-run; their pressed disc processes might be better but I'm not at the point where I can consider plopping down $1000 to get an apartment full of CDs) and their artwork templates don't seem to actually directly map to their artwork pipeline very well. I haven't tried uploading manufacturing art to TuneCore, though, so I don't know how well that works (but their templates do look a lot easier to deal with, too).

I do wish I'd known that TuneCore provides UPCs free of charge to all music distributed through them, though. I ended up sending foodsexsleep to manufacturing on Disc Makers first, and opted for the UPC there, because I knew I'd need a UPC for iTunes — but I didn't think that TuneCore would cover the UPC as part of their setup costs. So now there's two UPCs for foodsexsleep. Seeing as how the UPC is only actually useful for digital (I seriously doubt it'll ever make it to retail outlets) I guess the Disc Makers UPC will end up just going onto the initial run of 100 and will otherwise be unused. Hopefully it doesn't foul anything up down the road (like if CDBaby uses it when reporting statistics to SoundClick or whatever), although that'll just be limited to however many sales go through CDBaby from that run (which won't even be all 100 — I got the physical CDs more for friends/family and Song Fight! Live — so it'll really just be a minor blip if I'm lucky).

As far as presence and at least affecting a notion that they care, all three win stunningly — every time I post random musings about this stuff to Twitter, I seem to get almost immediate feedback from them assuring me that they really want my business and want to do everything they can to help me succeed (although I have a feeling that much of their help only really applies to touring/gigging musicians).

The only place where indies really miss out vs. mainstream bands anymore is radio, and radio is such a cesspit that I hardly ever listen to anyway (except NPR and the local jazz station). Fortunately, both Last.fm and Pandora are more than happy to play excellent music from excellent independents, all fueled by user recommendations, and all providing convenient "buy me!" links, which is way more than traditional radio could ever do.

Basically, it's a great time to be an independent musician.