I'm a big fan of the EP, especially when checking out new artists. It gives more of a flavor for the artist than a single, but requires less attention span than an album. Plus its usually a lot cheaper.

I've been frustrated with EPs on CD baby, both buying and if I were to sell mine because of the $4 cut. Usually EPs are $4 or $5 which is pretty much the entire chunk. It seems like any EPs you have either are priced low, and the artist gets nearly nothing, or are priced way to high, as much as a regular album. I know from the cdbaby business standpoint an EP is the same amount of work to store and ship, but it also is from any label or cd store's standpoint. The current model really steers people away from the EP format.

I'm wondering if you have any suggestions on how to deal with this, or do you plan to address this in the future?

Have you emailed to ask us to lower our cut? We often do on a case-by-case basis for EPs. And if you're going to be driving most of the sales yourself you can sign up for our affiliate program at CD Baby Affiliates: CD Baby Affiliates to make an extra $1 per sale.

Our biggest seller of all time is an EP:
CD Baby: ALEXI MURDOCH: Four Songs
I believe he sells for $7 and we keep $3.

It's still just the unfortunate physical space and labor of a pick, pack, and ship warehouse business. Our actual costs are $2 per CD. Which means:
$2 = expenses
$1 = saved for affiliate program
$1 = our profit

When we lower our cut to $3, we have to hope that too many people don't use the affiliate program, otherwise we only break even.

But you can, if you want.

When you go digital, though, the EP gets VERY interesting. We only take a 9% cut of the sale price, so you could sell an EP for $4 as a full-album download on cdbaby.com and make $3.64 per sale.

In your members' login area you can set the prices at whatever you want, so you could charge $7 for the physical CD and $4 for the download, for example.

See a beautiful example of this, here:
CD Baby: I AM JEN: The Broken EP
She's also a top-seller, using YouTube brilliantly.

my group released a single manufactured by Discmakers and I was not able to use my promo for CDBaby because of the $4 cut. I was dissapointed but I guess that was the price of doing the single.

Derek, I appreciate the info very much.

This guest forum has been ridiculously helpful in countless ways btw.

Thank you.