If you're an artist selling CDs through CDBaby, you can certainly also do direct sales. The problem faced by retailers (like me) is that it's an onerous task to contact individual artists (or individual labels) with the kind of small orders that make up the bulk of their business. A distributor, who generally carries many different labels, can deal with a single order made up of several small orders; a retailer dealing with such a distributor can purchase at wholesale rates withut the need of overstocking any one particular CD.