Sell Your Independent Music Online

There are a number of different approaches you can take to selling your music online as downloads on the internet. These can supplement the income of a musician. Apart from the obvious choices, there are other, potentially more attractive ideas being developed and evolved on the web.

The first traditional approach is to sign-up to a single website service who sell a artists music on their behalf and take a commission for each sale. They often hold the earnings for a period of time till they have reached a certain sales figure, before making payments.

One advantage is that they normally don't ask for any sign-up fees or monthly fees, so if the artist doesn't sell any music, they haven't lost any money. If they are smaller websites they may give you more promotion than the big boys.

The disadvantages are that the amount one can earn per track is a lot less than the retail price charged, because the service takes a percentage, the prices are often, but not always, charged at a fixed rate set by the web service. Also an artist won't get the money straight away and will invariably have to wait for sales to reach a certain figure before they get paid.

A more recent approach in the last few years is to use a digital distributor, who for a fee will place an artist's music in a number of large well known digital stores. This has the advantage of stocking music in all these stores in one fell swoop, placing music in all these services. The distributor will then collect all the money and from each service and make one single payment to the artist, normally each quarter.

The disadvantage is the artist has to wait many months after having paid, to get music on these services without any guarantees that they will sell anything. Also there is definitely no control over the price an artist's track is sold at, as this is totally dictated by the web services. Also again they have to wait for payments to be made, holding up cash flow whilst they wait. Again after commission the amount they earn is considerable less than via the diy method. iTunes is does have the advantage of hype and artist cling to the hope that if they're on there they will somehow sell music, many artists can't understand why once they're on a big music download service, they're not automatically selling loads of music.

With these big sites they are competing for attention with millions of other artists, the chances of casual browsers discovering and then buying their music is like trying to find a needle in a haystack. It's only the known of artists with some promotional clout and a lot of backing from a label, who will get exposure and the vicious circle continues, even smaller independents have recently campaigned for equal exposure on these services, so as a totally independent artist the exposure is even worse and the odds stacked against them.

What invariable happens is the independent musician has to promote their own music or merchandise and send fans and customers to his or her page on these services, whilst the service gives the artist no exposure, unless by the sheer volume of sales the independent bands selling mp3s can buck the trend and rise in the charts, so listeners become aware of them.

Many artists have used PayPal to sell their own music CD's for this very same reason and been happy with the independence it brings and extra earnings it generates and the direct customer contact. The issue with selling digital music is it requires some quite sophisticated technology to deliver the music to the customer after the payment is made. This means delivering an instant download link once the payment is completed, which will expire, so people can't share the link, it means providing a dedicated fast download speed to the customer and also providing the customer with a password so they can download the file again if they loose it. For these reasons it's far most cost effective and convenient to use a specialist service.

Also the services often provide a music player so people can preview the music and also a mp3 music widget which can be placed anywhere to promote music with a link directly back to the artists sales page.

The only disadvantage I can think of is that if the artist's don't sell enough they won't cover the monthly fee, but with a 30 day free trial, there's no risk. If you're an independent musician, band or artist who's serious about selling your music online you've got nothing to lose from giving it a go.

How To Get Your Band A Killer Website

In an earlier entry in this blog I gave a very brief overview of tips and what is entailed with setting up a website for your band. Now it's time to get to the hard-core aspect of this topic to make your site really fly. I deliberately 'softened' that entry for fear of scaring you off. Ideally, by now, you may have read that particular post and surmised that there is an awful lot more to it. Now I'm going to 'cut to the chase.'


It is inevitable that you will  have to, initially employ the services of a web site design expert. Ideally they are already an experienced webmaster. A competent and experienced webmaster will know webmaster tricks that you've never even heard of and probably not notice. Obviously, your webmaster will keep you up to speed on these intricacies. Your webmaster will also work closely in conjunction with your manager and your band. Once your web site design expert has every piece of knowledge that he requires he will immediately register your site under a domain name. The financial 'cap' on this should be pre-determined.


He will then busy himself making the site as visually appealing without too much 'clutter' whilst making literary tweaks in the interests of seo optimisation. SEO optimisation can make or break a site....and both factors can be achieved all too easily. This is why I highly recommend a web site design expert.


Once a 'draft' website has been completed, both band and management should be given access for either approval or further advice. Bare in mind, 'further advice' means further spending. Don't fall into the trap of having to borrow money merely for a website.


You are more than likely, if the person that you hired for your web site design is giving you their

all, tastefully and relevant Google Adsense Ads should appear on your site. If implemented properly, this can be a very handy form of residual income for your site.


On a final note, YouTube videos should be utilised on their site. Great care should, however, should be taken. YouTube videos of your band taken on a hand-held video from the back of a room aren't going to encourage return videos. I took the hint of a friend of mine. I mimed to my own soundtrack.....and it worked a treat.


Also, with regard to YouTube videos on your site, don't be afraid of saying a few words; a mini-blog, if you like. This brings your fans 'closer' to you. My advice in this department is....keep it short; ideally under 2 minutes. Keep your YouTube video content relevant but I encourage you to add your own personal touch


If you implement the above-mentioned strategies, I guarantee that your seo optimised website will very soon skyrocket in numbers on  a global scale.


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Your Bands Website. Part 1

Many working bands baulk at the notion of having their own website. This can be through lack of confidence or computer know-how or simply the fact that they are working so hard that time just isn't available. I cannot stress enough that in these modern times, an official band website is crucial for advertising. Having said this, it is not something that a band should jump into without research and consultation and precision. 


Organise a meeting with your manager who should have no hesitation in delving into your credit card to employ an expert to do the job. You may think this is costly but after the website has been completed it should be a low-maintenance affair.


Once your website has been created, it must be promoted. Firstly, the most valuable source of promotion is the contact the band already has with potential customers: CD sleeves, leaflets at gigs, posters, and press releases. Putting the web address on everything the band issues helps to develop loyalty to the site, especially if the site has a memorable web address. Online readers have a very low attention span. Ideally, your site should be attention-grabbing without going overboard.


A free mailing list is all important and should be used wisely. The people who have joined your free mailing list are interested in your music enough to join. The most common mistake made by bands is abusing their mailing list by over-using it. Offer members occasional free mp3 downloads and so-forth.


Exchanging links with other websites gives bands a chance to collect visitors from like-minded sites. If you have obvious influences or sound like a well-known band, seek out the leading fan websites and get them to review your music and exchange links. You can find them using the Ultimate Band List which lists entries for free and will create a category for your own band if you ask them to.

By visiting a search engine like www.google.com or www.webcrawler.com and entering the search keywords you want to come up under, you can see who's already got the top entry across a range of search engines. Rarely can you unseat them, but you can often exchange links with them. This is a surefire way to becoming a 'regular' appearance on SEO searches.


In a world swamped with free music, it's easier to promote ideas than tunes, so it's worth extending the ideas of your songs into webpages and using them to attract relevant traffic. You can also write music tutorials or diaries, which are likely to draw people interested in your style of music who might then download one of your MP3s. Make sure that you use descriptive keywords in the interests of search engine optimization (SEO). 


There's no point using 'music' or 'mp3', given the number of other sites using those keywords, but you might do better with '80s cover versions'. Be specific. You can submit your site to lots of search engines at once at Addme, but it can be more effective to submit the page to search engines one at a time by visiting them and then following the 'Add URL' or 'Suggest a site' links.


Another powerful promotional tool is the webring, a group of sites on the same subject that link in a chain. Visitors can follow the chain forwards or backwards by using a standardised box on each website. To find a suitable webring, visit www.webring.org. If you believe you're at the forefront of the next big thing, you can also start your own webring for free and set the rules for who gets to join.


Create a banner advert and encourage your fans to put it on their personal websites to bring you

traffic. You can also get a button from www.recommend-it.com that will automatically enable visitors to send an email to friends telling them how great your site is. In return, the visitors are entered into a competition to win US$10,000.


The Music Industry News Network is a free service that will distribute your music press release by email. To stand out online, you'll need to make sure you've got something unusual to say and a compelling reason for people to visit your website.


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