Yes. MusicBlvd offers a flat 5% of sales commission.
Amazon offers either a buck on CDs (which in general are priced higher
to the purchaser than the CDs at MusicBlvd) or they don't offer anything
at all.
In fact, several times people have bought books from Amazon using
FoRKrecommended and we didn't get anything. It has to do with the cost
Amazon gets the book for.
Some books Amazon is really generous for and gives us $3 (on say a $30
book, which is 10%), but the amount we get from Amazon on average
compared to what's puchased by joebar, dan kohn, etc is approximately
(drumroll please) 3%. In case you're wondering the cosmic significance
of 3%, please see
http://www.cs.caltech.edu/~adam/local/faq-adam.html#ninetyseven
> Amazon doesn't seem to advertise it (yet), but they do sell music,
> which can be used in the Associates program. No indie or obscure stuff
> unfortunately, but the selection seems about as large as what you'd find at
> a Borders. The two gripes on Associates is that you don't get cash if the
> user browses the site before adding the item to his/her shopping cart, and
> afaik, special order books don't count.
So the short answer is, MusicBlvd is better both for the purchaser and
for the FoRK fund in the general case where CDs are concerned, although
at times you can optimize and save a buck or two (or contribute a little
more to the FoRK kitty) by using Amazon.
So once more those URLs for those itching to use their credit cards are
http://www.cs.caltech.edu/~adam/local/fork-books.html
and
http://www.cs.caltech.edu/~adam/local/fork-music.html
which are both linked from the FoRK faq whose address tbyars can never
quite remember at
http://www.cs.caltech.edu/~adam/local/faq-fork.html
----
adam@cs.caltech.edu
The Verve got $1000 for the lyrics of "Bittersweet Symphony" but the
songwriting credit and all of the royalties go to Jagger and Richards.
The lesson here is simple: never sample the Rolling Stones and expect to
make any money off the result.
-- LA Times Calendar section, 3/29/98