Topic: Web shop for official recordings?

[sunjan]

Hi all,

I'm semi-official archivist for an old blues rock uncle over here (www.andersf.com).
He doesn't make a lot of money on his studio recordings (who does nowadays?!), but he was playing with the idea of setting up a web shop to recover his studio costs, for easy distribution of his live concerts. Either as made-to-order custom CDs, or just downloads.

This is where I come into the picture. I know that many artists in the US does this, as a spinoff to their tours.
But I have no clue what I need to set up a web shop?
Do I need to buy some software, or are there any free solutions?
And what about linking to the downloads, does the web shop software handle this by default?
Paypal would be the simplest payment solution, right. Do they offer some kind of hosting?
(An additional feature would be linking to Swedish online banks, but I don't assume anyone here on TS to fill in on that part... )
What about commercial proxies like itunes or Amazon download store? Is there any merit going thru them?
Of course we'd like to offer FLAC's, I guess itunes et al won't allow that?

I guess the most basic thing would be to do like this guy:
http://www.myspace.com/robdickinson
The buyer just provides his e-mail and gets a Paypal payment request in return, followed by a download link to the music. But there should be a framework to automate the procedure?

If you come to think of any artists with similar web shop solutions, please post the URL so I can try to figure out how it is set up.



Thanks a lot in advance!

[flipp]

Sounds like you are looking for something like digitalsoundboard.net ( http://app1.dsbd.net/dsb/index.jsp ).
I don't know much about it other than it exists. More info can be had by reading the FAQ and if that doesn't answer all your questions, try the form under "support".