Selling my music online, any tips ?

[VitaminD]

nahh.. I'm sure they were picking up royalties on their albums through the labels as well as mp3c

...or maybe (after reading that Steve Albini article) they were using the mp3c checks to pay for the albums they had on labels

[AndreasE]

You need to get on a label. If you are good enough, though, you will.

What is "good enough"?
Who decides if some kind of music is good or not? The label? The people who buy a single/album?
Are commercially successful artists always really good?

Questions and questions...

[GW]

I hate to be all negative here, but there are many ways to "make your music available". The real question is how do you get total strangers to want to seek out and purchase your recording? I guess it all boils down to promotion. Many people post to these forumns with signatures to their recordings. How many of these have you searched out and bought? Have you gone through the many online print-on-demand places discussed here? I find I'm wading through all sorts of bland music, on a not too fast connection, before I give up. Some of the big names have gone to private web sites (I'm thinking Prince and David Bowie) and talk about how they're changing things, but they're already operating from a high visibility. The technical details of getting a recording produced are not the delema. Either people will have to have a reason to make more of an effort to find music or there will have to be a new model for promoting it.

[Red_Force]

The real question is how do you get total strangers to want to seek out and purchase your recording?

IMO this is hardly a point. I mean, how do you sell a physical record nowadays amongst the hundreds if not thousands of monthly releases ? This is in no way specific to the internet medium. So far thus any exclusively-targeted-at-online-distribution music had to deal with a sever disadvantage : basically very little people were culturally ready to buy online. This has changed or at least, this is changing right now with iTunes. Well it's time to adapt, don't you think ? After all, KvR is the edgyest spot out there for anonymous web musicians

My point is that mainly, online music distribution, which was longly perceived as a damaging thing for musicians, is actually a chance. It's a pain, yes, but essentially for physical resalers*. Nowaday, you make a record and can hardly hope to get what ? 10% of public price ? Plus everything is slow, you have to spend a considerable amount of your time with all that's related to physical distribution (just for you musician : finding labels, convincing them, getting hired, redoing tracks until the label likes it, even if it turns out that the label's wrong, whatever).
Well, let say you do your website (and surprise, an amazing amount of musicians have allready done (or made done by fans) their websites in a very professional way), you do your communication (something you allready do when you're dealing with potentially interested labels), and bang, with a website you could make... say 80% on the price.

That's eight times more.

Ok, so prices are a bit cheaper online. But basically the idea is this : if you sell 5 times less online than off line, you do the same amount of money. For what I think could be less time spend.

What does it mean ? A lot of good things :

- you need to convince less customer which mean less comprimossions

- actually compromission may suck with this method, because in an online com plan that's back to the classics : your music is what makes your name in an ocean of people, so you'd better have to be different.

- you can have direct contact with your fans, a bit like we developper are able to stay very close to our customers nowadays. Believe me, this is important. Real contact/exchange with the people you work for is humanly intensively gratifying and gives sense to your life. That's something I am also seeking to find in the process.

Of course, this is music business, and there will be way more people making nothing than people making a living out of it. But this doesn't matter, what does matter is that it becomes possible to do it that way. Because it would ends up changing the inherent way music is made, i.e. changes the music. Exciting, isn't it ?

I think thus we all agree on this : basically the tough point is to give your tracks a chance - > to have people listening your stuff at least once to see if they buy or not. Personnally, I just see this as a challenge, but nothing impossible. Depending on your goals, you'll have to put more or less efforts on this. I am not sure you can become the new britney (or even the new portishead) online, but I do think you can make a living, or rewarding side activity if you're a talented smat ass (like Putte )

*: I say this based on observation on how the boxed vs online market has evolved for music software in the last five years. Just speculating...

[MfLI]

I hate to be all negative here, but there are many ways to "make your music available". The real question is how do you get total strangers to want to seek out and purchase your recording? I guess it all boils down to promotion. Many people post to these forumns with signatures to their recordings. How many of these have you searched out and bought? Have you gone through the many online print-on-demand places discussed here? I find I'm wading through all sorts of bland music, on a not too fast connection, before I give up. Some of the big names have gone to private web sites (I'm thinking Prince and David Bowie) and talk about how they're changing things, but they're already operating from a high visibility. The technical details of getting a recording produced are not the delema. Either people will have to have a reason to make more of an effort to find music or there will have to be a new model for promoting it.

I totally agree. In my thinking the activity potential is pretty much built on following corner stones starting from the more important:
1. A motivator for action (coming and finding the stuff) offered to potential clients
2. Enough exposure to potential clients
3. Speed of service
4. Eye n ear candy ie. Interesting, dynamic content

Unfortunately from a indie point of view the order is also from harder to easier in most cases.

Mika

[MfLI]

Red_Force, u are clearly an optimist and I think it's is great! We definetly need your kind of people in this world - instead of lot of bitching critics who don´t ever offer the slightest solution to anything they´re putting down. Keep up the attitude. I personally believe it´s is one of sttrongest forces one can have.

As I told you I am working on a somewhat extensive portal project regarding a revolutionary way to attract potential customers to take actions... and as I promised I'll keep the people here informed about how and when:) Now it´s a little early tho.

I salute you,
Mika