Musicians Beware!

Got an interesting email the other day... some guy in Africa who wanted to buy a bunch of copies of one of my old CDs to distribute in S. Africa and other nearby countries. But he wanted a discount off the retail price... well, yeah, I'd expect to sell for less for wholesale.

The thing that alerted me that he might not be legit, was that he offered to pay $8 wholesale for a CD that retails for $10... how's he gonna make a profit on that?

At first he wanted to buy 12,500 copies - until he found out I would have to do a manufacturing run and needed money up front to do that. Then it was suddenly 100 copies.

We eventually settled on 190 copies for $1500.

Then the strange stuff started... he wanted to send me an international money order for $5000, have me refund $3500 to his US agent who would pick up the CDs in person.

Let me guess... after I send the $3500 I'm going to discover that the international MO is counterfeit, right?

This is actually a well known scam - they first started doing it with high ticket items like cars on Ebay. About a year ago, folks selling expensive musical instruments online started seeing deals like this.

Well, it's gotten down to CD sales.

For now, I'm not going to publish the name and address of the guy who contacted me... it's possible that he's honest but clueless - not likely but possible. If I find out otherwise, I will publish his name.

The original contact came from the "email the artist" link on one of my CDbaby.com pages. Be on the lookout for similar offers from whereever your sell your CDs.

And use good business judgement - don't extend credit to someone you have no recourse against in the event that he defaults.