It’s the beginning of a new month, so now it’s time to indulge my readers with a monthly round up of top posts here on Blazing Minds as well as top commentators for the month of October and other stats that some people may find interesting.

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Continuing in my series of weekly updates from the Blazing Minds blog where I list blog posts I’ve enjoyed reading as well as some of the stats for the week, such as the top 5 referring websites that have graciously sent me some traffic over the week. As I’m going on my holiday this post is a little early this week.

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This is the fourth in my series of weekly updates from the Blazing Minds blog where I list blog posts I’ve enjoyed reading as well as some of the stats for the week, such as the top 5 referring websites that have graciously sent me some traffic over the week.

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Now no one can say that I don’t have wide range of posts on this blog, but the topic of music is something close to my heart, so I thought I would take the time out to write a post for fellow artists/bands with a little advice.

First of all lets start with CDBaby, now I have used CDBaby for three of our releases and have found them very easy to deal with, there is an initial one off cost of $35 per album and then $20 for a barcode for your release, so that’s $55 (£37), but then you post off five physical copies of your CDs to them for to catalogue which will cost you postage, but, CDBaby has now started a Digital Only service so now you only have to send one master to them.

Your music should get listed with several Digital Distribution sites including iTunes, Rhapsody, eMusic and more. CDBaby will take 9% of your earnings from your music, so you get 91% of your earnings from sales, which is really good.

Now on to TuneCore, now the difference here is that you upload all your work to the website and no CDs are needed to send to them. With Tunecore you pay and annual fee for your releases a single is $9.99 and an album is $19.98, also you have to pay $.99 per track and $.99 per store that you album is listed in.

So as an example if you release a 10 track album to all the stores it will cost you:

• $12.87 for all 13 stores
• $9.90 for all 10 tracks
• $19.98 for the annual fee
• Total of  $42.75 (£29.04)
• You Keep 100% profit!

As you can see it’s still cheaper than CDBaby, but, remember that you have to pay an annual fee, where as once your release has gone with CDBaby there are no more costs for you to pay.

So which to go for, hmm, I would personally say that if you are planning or wishing to sell a load of downloads than I would say TuneCore, but if you are looking in to the long term for your music and like your fans to also have the choice of buying a physical CD then I would go with CDBaby.

As I mentioned earlier we have used both for our music and have found that both are worthy of each other, we use CDBaby for our major album releases and use TuneCore for our smaller single and EP releases which we only release for a short period of time. But at the end of the day it’s your decision to make and I hope that this little bit of info has helped in some way or another

Now I must admit that I have been a fan of Inner Surge for many years and I thought it was just about time that I actually got of my proverbial backside and get the much acclaimed album Signals Screaming, so I did! And here’s my humble CD Review.

Originally released back in 2007 the album is just pure energy from the Canadian rock/metal band, with the opening track getting you quite unprepared for the blast of vocals that the album will bring to you, more of a thrash metal on some tracks, but with a mixture of the metal genre put in it’s deserved place.

These guys are just awesome and fans of groups such as Rage Against the Machine and Tool will love this album, tracks go from strength to strength and then you get the track “Wolves” which calms everything down, outstanding.

Streaming the tracks on the internet, just don’t do this album any justice you need to either download the album or get it on CD and play it LOUD, very LOUD and appreciate the power and the effort that Inner Surge have gone in to to produce not only an enjoyable album but one which you want to listen to over and over again!

9.5/10 Awseome

For more albums from Inner Surge check out CDBaby and for information on the band visit the official Inner Surge website.

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