You retain the copyright to your work. You retain the rights to sell CDRs or CDs of your music wherever you like. And you may do whatever you want with your music. The agreement between SFM and the artist is severable by either party on 60 days notice.

SFM works on a joint venture model with the artist. The artist and SFM split the proceeds from the sale of tracks or albums 50-50. This is much more favorable to the artist than the usual slippery label accounting. If we're all lucky and your sales reach over $600 for the year, we will issue you a 1099. We strongly suggests that you pay estimated quarterly taxes on your earnings and get familiar with the self-withholding process if you're not already. This is a great place to start collecting the information, publications, and forms you'll need.

When one of your tracks or albums is sold on SFM, the payment processing company (either BitPass, PayPal, or CafePress depending on the format sold) takes a cut of the purchase price. The size of this cut depends on the total cost of the order--as well as the processing company. (I.E. if you're selling a physical CD, but we are left to manufacture it, then we work with CafePress to do so instead, and they will set a base price for the CD. If we're storing your CDs and selling them for you, we will use PayPal, which takes a small percentage of each sale to cover their costs. If the album or tracks are an online sale for download then BitPass will take an extremely small cut. Downloaded sales are the recommended way to go.)

By the way, SFM doesn't currently offer any advances, as they're just a way of getting artists indebted to a company. Everyone's better off without them. We also do not, at this time, cover recording or mastering costs, but that may change in the future.

OK, so this sounds good to you, and you'd like to put some tracks up here. What do you do?

You'll notice as an artist that there's no "signup" form. In addition to being a store, SFM is also a record label and behaves like one--someone makes editorial decisions about whose files will be made available. And since we are a small operation, there are 2 people making the decisions. So rather than have a whole slew of bands we don't know signing up and putting whatever on the site, we invite people whose work we like, and with whom we'd like to work. Don't let that discourage you though...we'd be very interested in hearing from people who want to work with us.

So how do you get on the list? Send us a message from the contact page. Let's discuss what you're doing, and see if it fits. (Please do not email digital music files. Just send some text first.)