Top 10 Ways To Sell and Promote Music Online

I’m no Ariel Hyatt, but I’ve been told I have some good ideas for using online tools as an indie musician. I mean, heck, I do this for a living. If something I do doesn’t work, I drop it like a bad habit and move on to the next idea. Is this list comprehensive? Hell no. In fact, I’ll probably have better ideas tomorrow. Right now, though, this is the best list I could divine. Here are some patterns I’ve seen over the years:

1. Get your own damn domain name. If you haven’t done this yet, stop reading. Go to a domain registrar and register [your band name].com right now. If your band name is already taken, get a new band name. I’m serious. The first place anyone is going to look for your band, if they ever look for your band, is [your band name].com. Don’t make them hunt, ’cause most people won’t.

   And for God’s sake, don’t use any punctuation or weird spellings. If your band is called “The Fuzzy Ass Cookeez”, don’t register fuzzy-ass-cookeez.com. What are you going to say onstage (better yet, what are they going to remember)? “Fuzzy Ass Cookies dot com” or “Fuzzy dash Ass dash Cookies spelled with an ee ee zee dot com”? Change your band name if you have to, or make sure you can forward the easy-to-say version to your real band name. (Case in point: www.matthewevil.com).

2. Get your own damn website, too. Sure, a MySpace page used to cut it, but in case you hadn’t noticed MySpace now sucks. Facebook is starting to suck too. In fact, every major music spot online follows the same pattern: Nobody knows about them, everybody knows about them, someone buys the site, ads and marketers invade, suckage. If your website’s going to suck, at least make it suck on your terms, not someone else’s. The ads on my website are earning me money, not Rupert Murdoch.

   Get yourself a cheap web hosting account; I recommend Bluehost (and yes that’s an affiliate link). Even if all you’ve got up there is a single page with a link to your stuff on iTunes, you’re still better off than sending your fans elsewhere to watch someone else’s annoying popover ads.

3. Use the one tool that uses all the other tools. It’s called an Aggregator. Are you on Twitter? Facebook? Livejournal? Myspace? How about your own blog? If you need to send out an update to one site, you need to send an update to all of them and that takes time. Your three options are do it yourself, hire someone to do it, or just find the tools to do it all for you. My three favorite aggregators are:

   WordPress – www.wordpress.org

   Aside from running this entire site, there are tons of free plugins that will cross-post my entries to other services. Currently I post to Facebook, Livejournal, Twitter, and LinkedIn every time I write a blog post. I’m sure there are more cross-posting plugins available, I just haven’t looked in a while.

   CD Baby – www.cdbaby.net

   I’m not just talking about blog entries and calendar updates, I mean selling your music too. New online stores and streaming services come and go almost weekly. I could waste as much time signing up for them all as I could playing Plants vs. Zombies, or I could let the folks at CD Baby do it all for me. They take a percentage, but it’s worth it to have my time back. Those zombies aren’t going to kill themselves.

   ArtistData – www.artistdata.com

   Calendar cross-posting is a pain in the ass. Fortunately, the folks at ArtistData know this and started a site just to make my life easier. The basic services, like calendar and blog synching, are free, but there are “apps” you can buy to expand the reach and function of the site.

4. Don’t go where the musicians are unless you want to meet other musicians. Every ten minutes, a new Indie Music site is born. You know why? Because idiots like me will waste time uploading our music and info there giving them a ton of free content to use as an advertising vehicle. You know who visits these sites? Idiots like me. Once. Just to upload our own crap and leave. It’s a digital circle-jerk that’s only good for finding other indie musicians- not a bad goal, but make sure that’s why you set up shop there.

   Unless the site’s doing something truly groundbreaking or you know there’s a crowd of non-musicians flooding the site, don’t waste too much time on it. Make sure the site emails you if someone tries to message you there; if you make one fan from that site, it’s worth the 10-minute setup, but typically the site dies before that happens. Upload your usual demo material you’re giving away for free and post tons of links back to your website.

5. Give away free music on your website. If you’re like me, nobody knows who you are. They’re not going to buy your music based off a badly-times 30-second sample on iTunes unless you’re either extremely lucky or the Hypnotoad. I give away 5 Free Songs to anyone who joins my email list and people seem to consider that a fair trade. Give people a chance to listen to your music without commercials or fade-outs for as long as they like. It took me weeks of hearing Josh Fix for free on Pandora to finally decide to buy his EP.
6. Screw radio. When you’re famous enough to get real radio coverage (not college radio, not local artist spotlight at 11pm on Sunday night), you’ll have people working 8 hours a day trying to get you airplay. I worked at a record label, I saw it happen. Every record label has a person or a whole department calling program directors around the clock to push the new singles. Can you compete with that?

   Online radio is nothing new, but its implementation is finally reaching far beyond the desktop PC. Services like Pandora are available on phones, in cars, on the iPad, you name it. And they don’t rely on a guy in a suit to create the set list for all the stations in the midwest, they rely on a matching algorithm. If you like Ben Folds, you’re going to hear me on your Pandora station.

   Go to submitmusic.pandora.com to get started. The best part? Pandora pays performance and songwriting royalties. Get all your albums on there, spread the word, and wait for latté money to come to you. Wait, you’re not hooked up with a service to receive royalties yet?

7. Get paid for internet radio play. Performing Rights Organizations are how songwriters have been receiving money for decades and it doesn’t cost you a dime to sign up. Recently the performers themselves have started receiving royalties as well, whether they wrote the songs or not. If you write your own music, join a PRO like BMI or ASCAP and register your works there. No matter which one you choose, you should also join SoundExchange if you want to receive royalties for your performance of those songs. It’s a lot of paperwork and sometimes a long wait, but when the checks start coming in you’ll be glad you did it.
8. Sell CD’s without going broke. Seems like a no-brainer, right? Guys like Leo Laporte like to say that “CD’s are dead”, but the fact is that people still buy them. Lots of them. Fortunately, Kunaki.com will create print-on-demand CD’s with full-color artwork and free UPC bar codes so you don’t have to order them until the fans have already paid for them. One at a time they cost about $5.20 shipped. If you buy more, of course, the shipping is significantly less. Rather than ordering 1,000 units to get the prices down to $2 per CD, you can order 10 at a time and get them for $1.80 per CD. Yeah, the options are few and pressed CD’s are still more durable than duplicated, but you don’t need to go the 1,000-disc route until you know you can sell that many.
9. Don’t waste time building a ghost town. How many times have you been to someone’s website with their very own “discussion forum”? I’m willing to bet that 90% of those fora don’t have any real discussion happening. Until you reach a threshold where you’re really interesting enough for people to gather and talk just about YOU, setting up an on-site discussion forum is a good way to advertise that nobody is interested in you.

   Online interaction is all about people. People. Yeah, those fans are actually people with lives and kids and fears and prejudices and favorite foods. They’re going to congregate where their interests are, not on your website. If you’ve got the time, go where they’re going and join the discussions as an interested person, not as someone trying to sell CD’s.

   If you don’t have the time, at the very least you can make their comments and feedback come to you, wherever the fans are.

10. Google doesn’t sleep, but you can. People are mentioning your name online right now. Did you know that? No? Is it because you’re not reading every website known to mankind? Hell no. It’s because you’re not asking Google to do that for you.

    Go to google.com/alerts and look for your name. Or look for your genre, like “piano rock”. Look for artists that are similar to you. Look for key phrases that relate to your songs, like “robot ninja”. Google Alerts will email them to you or create an RSS feed you can read daily, weekly, whatever.

    You’d be surprised how fast you can turn someone into a lifelong fan with a simple blog comment. I’ve landed VIP Subscribers just by saying thank you when someone mentions they liked hearing “Drive Away” on Pandora.

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