busybee General Articles

Recently I finally set up a shopping site for me to sell some of my art and other merch. In doing so I evaluated a bunch of different shopping cart providers, and decided I should share my findings.

This is of course not an exhaustive list by any means; it only covers the providers and mechanisms I evaluated in trying to build something functional, quickly.

Also this is only for situations where you’re self-fulfilling your own goods; on-demand manufacturing is an entirely different situation (and for that your best bet is probably Redbubble, although I personally mostly use Threadless).

Updated, February 20, 2021: Added information about ko-fi, removed recommendation for Storenvy

Updated, February 9, 2022: Added some stuff about Gumroad, bump ko-fi up to top recommendation, add some terminology explanations

Streaming music production has its own set of challenges which aren’t well-addressed by the various tutorials out there. After a lot of iteration, here is a setup I ended up with that had a reasonable balance of flexibility and performance.

It should also be fairly adaptable to other situations where a single-computer setup doesn’t obtain the necessary performance.

As an independent musician who has been distributing music online since the late 90s (and selling it online since 2000), I am always keeping track of the current landscape for selling music, both online and physically, with a focus on small fanbases and narrow-scale distribution.

As of January February 2019, here are what I believe to be the best practices for selling music online.