Carl Hutzler's Blog

IndieKazoo (http://indiekazoo.com/) launched this week. No, I haven’t seen it written up on Techcrunch yet, but I am sure Michael will get around to it soon :-)

IndieKazoo is a music e-commerce site for independent artists that requires no web or e-commerce knowledge on the part of the musicians/bands. As a band, you go to the site, sign-up and in less than 10 minutes or so (well maybe uploading the mp3’s takes a little longer ;-) your music is available for sale via download or snail mail (you get to mail out the CD).

In my opinion the site is extremely well designed for the artist as well as the buyer. The UI is simple and straight forward which makes it easy to learn. They also provide tons of reports to show who is buying your music, profits, etc. And on the buying side, the site has a very well designed shopping cart system enabling visitors to listen to music samples and buy individual songs or albums, etc. It is what a Web 2.0 site should be.

The big bonus that IK has (over competitors like Apple/iTunes) is that the artist has complete control over pricing and they also do not need to share (a fairly hefty) chunk of the profits with the overlords. With IK, you get to keep all the profits and you can even get a check cut the same day. These are good things for starving artists.

I am not a musician…I am a photographer. I use a site which I blogged about a few months ago called SmugMug which allows me to sell photographs and is analogous to IndieKazoo. I think Indie Kazoo has the potential to be the solution for independent musicians in much the same way Smugmug caters to professional photographers.

Check out the new site and I think you will be impressed with the interface and professionalism the developers (Kenny Feldman and Eric Schwartz) poured into the project. I also think the name they picked is excellent. Well done, guys!

Kenny is a good friend of mine and a very talented web designer.