Sell your independent music online
As an independent artists you must remember to make your music accessible through various sites for consumers to purchase. Sometimes independent artists get stuck in the promotions of their music and forget one of the most important aspects of the music industry; which is making money off your songs. Below are a few links to various sites that allow individuals to sell their songs. Please visit a few of the sites to get morefamiliar with them before you start placing your songs into the consumer market.
Ditto Music
They upload you to iTunes FREE of charge, cover over 700 stores ( new sites like Spotify, Nokia, we7, as well as all of the tunecore stores ); and get you up in half the time of tunecore. They can also make you chart eligible and collect airplay royalties.
CD BABY
Tune Core
Watunes
Emubands
The Orchard
Rhapsody
ITunes
emusic
Audigist.com
Audigist is a digital distribution service for record companies, unsigned bands and artists. Artists receive 75% of the download price, and their own page to upload images and info.
AudioPyro
Easy-listen
Easy-listen.com is an online music download service striving to serve the community of professional musicians by offering them a sales channel direct to the public. Downloads go at 0,99€ per single track. Musicians may check the status of their sales online 24×7. Confirmation emails are also sent every time a sale is made. Keep track of your sales with all the transparent convenience of theinternet.
Lulu.com
Highly recommended for individual download sales. Lulu.com is an on-demand publisher of books, music, and images.The good: An inexpensive way to sell your tracks and CDs. Listeners may preview your work via streaming audio. Listeners may rate the quality of your work. You set the price for your download, all the way down to FREE. You may choose to allow other artists to include your work along with their own projects and receive full royalties. NON-EXCLUSIVE. No wait — your content is available instantly.
The bad: Uploading custom album covers and art is a bit of a pain. You must use ‘customize your storefront’ in order to change song order — another pain. Not good for CD sales that I can see, but you can sell individual downloads.
Mperia
Mperia is an online outlet for CDBaby. Uploading an album to CDBaby and accepting their exclusive digital distribution deal gets your tracks added to Mperia, where the individual digital tracks can be sold.The good: Easily sell your tracks online. Promotion tools.
PrimeTones
It was designed as a ringtones (for your cell phone) site, but it’s accepting artists and providing them with artist pages. Individual download sales. Allows deep linking.
SoundLoud/SoundStation
The good: Nice enough layout, good genres. Individual download sales and digital CD sales permitted with a paid subscription — all proceeds go to artist. Some strong artists on SoundStation. SoundLoud Radio coming soon. Don’t known much else about this one yet. Not sure how much traffic this one gets. I uploaded one song and was immediately featured on my genre page — that was nifty.
The bad: No deep linking that I can see, could be wrong. You must pay a minimum of $9.95/mo. for e-commerce (selling downloads, CDs). Albums sold on SoundStation are digital only.
TradeBit.com
Tradebit is an intelligent file hosting platform, used by many independent musicians to sell their MP3s on their OWN PayPal account. The platform offers storage space with unmetered traffic, starting with 20 megabytes and goingup to 5 gigabytes for $9.95/month. For musicians, the creation of albums from single MP3s is a useful on-site feature . Users get a freesubdomain “username.tradebit.com”.
May 4th, 2009 at 10:48 am
Please beware of anyone promising to “get your music up faster.” It’s not a function of the distributor: the wait, if there is one, is at the stores.
TuneCore delivers your music to the stores you choose SIX HOURS after you give it to us. It’s just transmitting a digital file, music and metadata, it’s not something that takes much time. But the stores have to process and review your music according to their own policies, and the wait can be weeks, especially for a store like iTunes. iTunes reviews the artwork and music, by human hand, and that can simply take a long time.
Pick the distributor that’s best for you, but do your homework first! The best distributor is the one that’s best for you–only you can decide that.
Thanks.
–Peter
peter@tunecore.com
May 8th, 2009 at 3:01 pm
I agree with Peter as distributing content to the stores faster is mainly based upon the music stores themselves. Each store has a ‘lead’ time that they suggest to each Content Provider that would result in a much appropriate timeframe for a release.
In cases like these, this is why we usually recommend users from WaTunes to prepare a release-date at least a month in advance (4-6 weeks). This gives all the stores time to prepare and as a result, the release will be made available to every music store service at the same time. Not all distributors will work for everybody, so it’s really a decision of the artist or label on whether or not that distributor is best suited for their needs.
Kevin Rivers
CEO, WaTunes.com
May 22nd, 2009 at 9:34 am
Another good site to try is http://gonogging.com/ You can put up your music to sell in a very straight-forward matter, or if you are feeling motivated, record a song or jingle for someone else looking for one.