Bands with the Same Name (blog)

This  is a quickie blog. I just want to sing the praises of one of the best indie music businesses out there. CDBABY!!!

 

Yes, with services like Bandcamp you can sell your CDs directly to your fans and that is wonderful. But, it also helps to have your stuff on the major download sites like iTunes because a lot of people just prefer buying from a big name. If you are an indie artist, you have to go through a music aggregator to get on iTunes and that’s where CDbaby and services like Tunecore come in. Great for us! But, here’s the problem. What if you or your band have the same name as another artist or band? Confusion in the store! (see pic below) The last thing you want to happen is to have all your hard advertising work go to waste when customers seek you out only to download someone else’s music. It happens! 

I have this issue.

 

Now, I actually went to the trouble to have my name legally trademarked so, technically, I could start proceedings against the other artist to keep them from both selling CDs and performing under the name “Laura Marie”. But that seems like a bit much, right? I don’t really want it to come to that. But, as it turns out, for this issue, that won’t be necessary. Yay! for both of us. 

Because my music is distributed to iTunes through CDBaby, all I had to do was call them up (just login to your account and hit “contact”). CDBaby customer service, as always, was super helpful and I was told that all they had to do was submit a ticket to have my works separated from the other Laura Marie in the iTunes store. For now, that’s all I really wanted. 

They say I should be hearing from Apple within the week. I’ll let you know how it goes. Just know that if you have the same problem, you have to contact the content provider that submitted your music to iTunes. Here is a list of all those approved by Apple for indie artists: MUSIC AGGREGATORS. They’ll have to log in to your Apple artist account on your behalf and submit a ticket. If you are with CDBaby, just call them up and ask for Patrick. 🙂

Pass it on! This info could really help some artists set themselves apart. 

 

Sweet! – Laura Marie

 

P.S. I have a NEW WEBSITE and it’s awesome. Check it out and let me know what you think. I’ll be blogging about how easy it was to put together very soon…