Quote Originally Posted by tocsin
There's no reason why a shop couldn't be setup strictly DIY either. It's just a question of looking into the economics to figure out how much you can charge for mp3 and how economical it would be. The costs would essentially be bandwidth, space, service charges for credit cards.
No there isn't a reason, but if you like to sleep at nights it could be wiser to make a non-exclusive deal with some existing smaller digimusic shop - there's probably more profit for the label in it than if trying to run it yourself when you calculate all the costs. First of all the amount of work when building a working and reliable (plus secure, it's peoples money we're dealing with here) digital music shop isn't a joke. For example, there were three of us working on our Foryourears.com and it took us about 6 months to put together the first version. Even PayPal payments aren't that easy when done properly (real-time payments).

Hosting (bandwidth, backups..) is going to cost you. You can distribute files, but that requires more technical solutions (how to make sure files cannot be downloaded without payments). Credit card payment option is probably going to cost you $$$ per year. Add paying taxes to the calculation and remember to pay GEMA or a similar copyright association so they won't have to shut you down.

The most hardest thing however is the support and maintenance. Something like this requires someone to look over the shop every day - the hosting company might have problems, a hard disc can break down, there could be a programming error, someone doesn't know how to download and is pissed if you don't reply in a couple of hours max. Adding new stuff and producing content takes time. The point being: if a customer pays money to download tracks, the thing must operate 100% reliable. And when it's people + computers, things are going to break down and need immediate actions, mostly every day.