Thanks, Steve.
I have added those to the small bundle of others I found. (Been looking for this Payloadz site for some time - but had been spelling it wrong, naturally, and ended up instead with information about particular viral dangers.)
My search for an affordable independent on-line solution first started almost two years ago. The firm Finn mentions in passing, The Orchard, was one of my first stops. They are a digital distributor, by the way, not a store-front like iTunes. And they claim to be the biggest. But then, so does the company they led me to, one called Loudeye, who have been in the business of digitally encoding media since 1997, and are heavily capitalised by Microsoft, Intel, AOL-Time Warner, CBS, NBC et al. Loudeye were the guys who designed the shop-front software for all those other traders. It came as a kind of “white-label” package that enabled other operations to dress it up as a bespoke branded identity. It was predictably way beyond my means but, as they had by that time moved into the business of also supplying content, we instead entered a digital distribution deal with them. All the omens were good: the rate per download was significantly better than other options I’d been chasing, the ISRC encoding process was charged at around one fifth of the price offered by other companies, it promised a great deal more that I shan’t waste time going into, and it was non-exclusive. Just what we wanted.
Only they don’t actually deliver the goods – far too busy with survival through growth and acquisitions to concern themselves with low priorities like proper service to small fishes like us.
In the interim, thankfully, these other smaller software companies have developed packages that enable small-time independents like us to offer downloads for sale without losing an arm and a leg in the process. Great. We get quite a lot of site traffic, and we also have a lot of projects mixed and mastered that we can’t afford to manufacture yet. All I need to do is find out what the choices are and which one is right for us. So thanks again for your comments, Steve. I need the help and appreciate it very much.