Yes I know, this goes against everything you’ve been taught so far. We all know how hard it is to sell your music to new fans, so the obvious step seems to be giving out loads of freebies until people are ready to buy your music right? Ummm, wrong!

The thing is, giving your music out for free can actually be doing more harm then good. By doing this, musicians are reinforcing the view that music should be free for listeners. In actual fact, musicians have as much right to make money by benefiting other people’s lives as anyone else does. Would someone makes board games just to give them out for free? Would a cleaner clean a hotel if they weren’t getting paid? Would a bus driver allow free passengers just because they enjoy driving? No, no, and NO!

In this article, I will show you exactly why giving your music out for free is a bad idea. I will also show you what you should be doing instead, and help you get your music distribution tactics back on track.

Note: If you find this article useful and want to stop other musicians making these common mistakes, please share it around as much as possible.

What I Define As ‘Free’

Before I go any further, I’d like to define what I mean when I say ‘free’.

Giving your music out for free is giving your songs out without you gaining anything tangible in return.

Yes you may get a few more people learning about you and becoming fans, but these results can be few and fan between. On top of that, a lot of these new fans will forget about you as time goes on. As they download more and more free music, your song will probably get lost somewhere on their hard drive.

What You Need To Remember

When you make your music, you need to ask yourself: Who do you really make it for? A lot of people claim they make music just for the love of it. If that’s the case, you don’t need to be reading this article. Independent Music Advice is a website aiming to help you learn the business side of the music industry, and therefore gain more fans and money. If you’re making music just for you, carry on singing in your bedroom.
If however it’s your aim to gain fans and make money, you need to remember one thing: People will only become a fan of you and your music if it benefits their lives. In other words, you’re offering them a service.

Now ask yourself this: Why are you paying to make other people happy? It costs you time and money to make music, so if you’re giving all this music out for free, you aren’t really getting anything from the deal. The people who download your music however are getting exactly what they want. Does this seem fair to you? Because it doesn’t to me…

Giving people an unlimited amount of your music for free is a big problem, and something that needs to stop.

The Problem With Giving Out Too Much Free Music

OK, so now why is giving out your music at no cost a bad thing? Well:

• It Doesn’t Make People Want To Listen To You Any More.
  Just because you give out your audio as a free download, it doesn’t mean that you will get a lot of people downloading it. Even if you hand someone out a free CD, there’s no guarantee that person will go on to listen to it. Many times people have given me free CDs at events and shows. Do I go on to listen to all of them? No. And I know a lot of people are the same.
  It takes more then just giving someone your music for them to listen, you have to give them a reason to want to listen. If you don’t do that, your CD will end up at the bottom of a pile and never get played.
  Now the interesting thing; If you can give people a reason to want to listen to your music, you won’t have to give your music out for free! You will be able to ask for something in exchange, and they will be willing as they already have it in their mind they want to hear your music. This largely makes giving your music out for free obsolete.
• People Start To Expect It.
  If you always give your music out for free, people will come to expect it. So when you start to make more of a name and you decide you want to start charging for your music, you will have a hard time selling it. After all, the majority of your fan base is made up of people who are in it for the freebies. As soon as they see they have to start paying now, many of your fans will disappear. They already have a load of your music, so what’s pushing them to get any more?
  While you may get some that stay and don’t mind paying for your music, you will look back and realise you spent a lot of time and effort making people happy who didn’t benefit your career in any way. Not a good feeling at all.
• Your Music Will Have A Lower Perceived Value.
  Perceived value is what people think your product is worth. If something is widely available for free, people will naturally feel like it’s not worth as much as it’s easy to obtain. This is how a lot of people think about music right now.
  If however something is harder to obtain or it’s a higher price, people naturally think it’s of a better quality. Because of this, it’s sometimes possible to raise the price of your product and make more sales then if you set a lower price point.
  You of course don’t want to charge so much that it’s not worth buying your music, but giving it all away for free will definitely make people perceive your music to have less value.
• You’ll Lose Money.
  Making good quality music isn’t free. You have to pay to use the recording studio, for the cost of pressing up products, for marketing and promotion expenses, and for anything else that needs to be done. If you do all of this only to give your music out for free, you are losing out on money. And where does that money come from? My guess is your own pocket.
  You shouldn’t be paying to make other people happy, it should be a two way thing. You should benefit from people hearing your music, and you shouldn’t be afraid to ask for something in exchange for your songs.
• You Will Lose Motivation.
  If you keep spending money on creating music that people don’t end up downloading, you will eventually lose motivation. If you lose motivation, what’s to keep you making music any more?
  We get into music for the love of it, but there are things along that way that have many a musician giving up on the industry. If you don’t want to become one of these people, you will need to start seeing some tangible results. Giving out your music free of charge doesn’t often give tangible results, so isn’t really worth you doing.

What You Should Be Doing Instead

So, now we know you shouldn’t be giving your music out for free, what should you be doing instead? Well:

1. You should be selling it. And,
2. You should have some songs available to download as part of an exchange process.

The selling your music part it pretty obvious. You should have your music on a shop page of your website where people can buy it in exchange for money.

The exchange process on the other hand is something quite different.

Instead of letting people download your music for nothing in return, you should only allow people to download some of your songs if they help you out in some way. This could be them giving you their contact details, or by them promoting your music in some way. This is a win win situation for everyone. They get to download your music and learn about you, and you get to keep in contact with them or have them promote you to all their friends.

We call the songs we use in this exchange process ‘promotional songs’, and cover this strategy in a lot more detail here. In that article we look at how to give out your promotional songs (And the best way to maximise their effect), the single to promotional songs ratio, how to encourage more people to download your promotional songs, how you can use your promotional songs to encourage people to buy your paid releases, and much more.

Should You Give Your Music Away For Free Conclusion

Giving your music out for free is a huge mistake, and one that many musicians unfortunately make. When you know how however, it’s possible to let people hear a few of your songs without paying any money, but also benefit from the deal yourself. It also gives your music a higher perceived value, and makes you appear to be a cut above the rest.

Don’t give out all of your music for free and expect to get loads of fans overnight, most people will still largely overlook your music as there’s so much free songs floating around anyway. By putting a small barrier in the way of obtaining your music, you may get a few less downloads, but anyone that does download will be more of a quality fan.

If this article has been an eye opener to you (And I hope it has), please share it round on your favourite sites. Thanks as always for your support, and I hope to see your views in the comments.

There are two main places you should be selling your music online: On your own website, and on other established digital download shops such as iTunes and Amazon MP3. Today we’ll be looking both at how to sell your music on iTunes (And other popular MP3 stores), and how to sell digital downloads on your own website. First however, let’s have a look at why you may want to sell your music online.

You can also see more indepth strategies on selling your music online and giving it out in lesson 3 of the Academy.

The Benefit Of Selling Your Music Online

One of the main reasons you will want to sell your music online, is because the kind of reach you can obtain.

When you sell physical CDs to your fans, there is of course a distance barrier to overcome. While it won’t be a problem getting your music into shops that local fans can shop in, you won’t be able to get into every shop worldwide. This will mean that a large percentage of people won’t have access to your music, even if they wanted to buy it.

If your music is available online however, anyone with an internet connect has access to your music. It doesn’t matter if they live half way around the world or across the road, they can still access your audio just as easily as each other. If more people have access to buying your music, you will of course have a better chance of selling more of your songs.

Another big advantage of being able to sell your music online, is that fans will have instant access to your songs. Even if you do mail a physical CD to someone half way across the world, it’ll still take a few days for your music to get to them. If you deliver it online however, they will get access to your product instantly. This is a big selling point for people these days, so much so that you can lose sales if you haven’t got a digital download version of your CD available on the internet.

Quick Note: Releasing Digital Download Only Songs

Now, here is one of the main reasons why many people have switched to releasing digital download only releases over the last few years: The set up and maintenance cost is very low!! Pressing up a physical product is very expensive in comparison, and a lot more financially risky. You have to pay for the duplication or replication, the CDs, the artwork printing on each CD, the packaging and the distribution. If you only release digital downloads however, you get rid of most of these costs. All you have to do is pay for the artwork (Which you would have also done with a physical product) and the distribution of your product either via a 3^rd party website or a shopping cart system on your own website (Which is a low one off cost).

This will save you a LOT of money, baring in mind that as you sell more songs, you won’t have to spend more money on pressing up costs. Once you have paid to set up your online sales, you don’t have to pay another penny. Whether you sell one download or a million, you will have still paid the same price to set up your selling system. That means the more songs you sell, the more profit you will make.

Although this is just the tip of the iceberg for advantages of selling your music over the internet, I’m sure you can see that it is worth doing. Instant access for fans and cheap set up costs for musicians has meant that selling digital downloads has become a no brainer. Check out the below sections to see exactly how to sell your music online.

How To Sell Music On iTunes And Other Websites

If you’re selling your music online, one of the places you’ll want fans to have access to your music is on iTunes. This is probably the biggest seller of digital downloaded music online, so being on here can get your music in front of a lot of potential fans.

The best way to sell music on iTunes, is to get them on there via Songcast (It’s free to create an account). Songcast are an online digital distributor that gets your music into all different online music stores. Some places it distributes to includes iTunes, Amazon MP3, Napster, Spotify, and many more. Many of these online stores you wouldn’t be able to get into without help from a company like this, so if you don’t opt to go with them, don’t expect to get your music into the big shops.

Check it out if you want to easily get your music into these places. The process is fully explained once you are on the site.

How To Sell Music On Your Website

When it comes to selling your music on your own site, you will need a different set of tools.

If your website is based on WordPress, one option is to use the WordPress Store plugin. This plugin allows you to upload your songs in digital format, and sell them securely on your website. It creates a shopping cart for your websites, allowing your to sell any digital downloads such as MP3s, wallpapers and videos.

Once you have uploaded everything you want to sell and added the shopping cart to your website, everything else is done securely and on auto pilot.

So say for example someone comes and visits your site and stumbles across your shop page. They like the sound of your music, and want to buy your MP3. Once they click on your buy now button, they are automatically taken to their shopping cart and shown what they have decided to buy. From here they can choose to checkout and buy the song, or go on to browse for more of your songs and merch they want to buy…

When the buyer of your music decides they are ready to check out, they simply choose this option. From here they are given the option to pay for your music via PayPal or via card. Both are fully secure.

Once they have paid, they are automatically given a link to download your song. This link will be created randomly, and will expire after the amount of time or downloads you set. This means that even if someone does try and send your link around, the link will stop working and they won’t get your song.

All this is done automatically once you have set it up for the first time, so it’s a great way of selling your music on your blog.

Another option for selling your music is through E-Junkie. E-Junkie essentially provides the same features as the WordPress Store, accept it can be used even if your website doesn’t run on WordPress.

E-Junkie also doesn’t store your music on your own website, which is handy if your website only has limited storage space.

Both of these options offer a good solution for you. While WordPress Store is a one off fee however, E-Junkie has an ongoing one. Even so, both are reasonably cheap, and will allow you to sell your music safely online.

Pitfalls Of Selling Your Music On The Internet

While selling your music on the internet is becoming common practice, there is still a minor pitfall that some people can’t get over. This is of course the whole thing about sharing and digital piracy. People sharing your music on the internet for free has become a big issue, mainly because it means people are getting your songs without putting money in you pocket.

So what’s the solution, not selling your music online? Well, no, not really…

You see, these days, even if you don’t put your music on the internet, someone else will. There’s no point not putting your music up in digital format, if you don’t provide fans with a legit buy now button, they’ll simply turn elsewhere and get it for free.

If however you release some music and no one uploads it online for free, that’s a sign that your music isn’t good enough. That, or you’re not promoting yourself enough for people to know about it. Neither of these is a good thing.

While it’s not ideal to have your songs online for free download, it’s going to happen, so just get used to it. Focus on the people who are going to buy and become your fans, these are the people you make music for.

As you can see that’s not really a pitfall, as your music will end up online anyway. As long as you sell it in the correct manner, having an online version of your songs for people to buy is a good thing.

How To Sell Music Online Conclusion

Selling your music online is a must for any musician wanting to monetize their music. People should be able to purchase your music on both you own website, as well as any other popular music stores they might be browsing.

Using WordPress Store and Songcast (More information about both of these and links to them are above), both of these things are easily achievable. So follow the above instructions to get your songs available to buy in digital download format. That’s how to sell music online.

Minimising Risk With Digital Singles

The big difference between digital and physical distribution is the up-front costs. It is relatively cheap and easy to get your music available worldwide on iTunes and other online music stores. A physical release on the other hand is a lot more pricey, with the cost of manufacturing and cover printing (amongst other things) considerably adding to the capital required to do it. This makes it much riskier then selling your music online.

However, although digital sales are growing, when it comes to albums they are still eclipsed by CD sales by a considerable margin. And although the vinyl market is small, it is still one of the only consistent growth areas of the music industry at present.

The main advantage of selling music online before deciding to sell a physical product is that it gives you some idea of how much demand for your music there is. This can help you make decisions on how many copies to press up, or whether to take the risk at all.

Online Music And Building Demand

Public relations can only be done effectively when there’s something to promote. A digital single or EP release gives a hook for a public relations and marketing campaign to operate from. Before your physical album release, releasing a couple of digital singles lets you (or your PR agency) build up relationships and interest with bloggers, journalists, DJs and yes, fans. All of these people can be used to help promote your album when it comes out…

If you stay organised and take these digital singles seriously, you could end up with a sizeable mailing list both of industry types and new fans. At the very least, anyone who’s bought your single and has it on their iPod will remember you exist by the time your physical release comes out, and hopefully buy it.

Physical Music As Premium

Perhaps through your digital releases you’ve figured out that there’s only enough demand for a limited run of physical product. In that case, it’s a perfect opportunity to take advantage of tiered pricing, something that is becoming increasingly common practice in an industry desperate to take advantage of the higher margins afforded by ‘luxury’ products.

Do a small run of 100 – 500 CDs or vinyl records to support your digital release. If you’ve gained enough exposure from your preceding singles, you might be able to sell them all just to your mailing list.

Selling music online has levelled the playing field for independent musicians, but it also opens up greater opportunities in physical distribution as well – not least in providing a track record for physical distributors to make decisions on.

About The Author:
Nick Lewis is writing on behalf of Zimbalam, a site who pays 100% royalties to musicians selling music online via their digital distribution services.

In this article we will look at why you should get your music in the biggest online music stores, and how you can easily go about doing this (We provide you with the best way to distribute music). We also touch on a few other related topics, so if you want to get on Itunes have a read to find out all the info.

Why Should You Get Your Music On Napster, Itunes And the Rest?

There are a few reasons you should be looking to get your music on these big online music shops, one of them being their popularity. While selling your music directly from your own site is good if you get lots of people to it every day, if you’re still not getting that much natural traffic it’s going to be hard to make sales. This is where these big websites come in. If you end up being one of their featured acts, you will get a flood of traffic to your sales page. And the more people that see your sales page, the more sales you will make (Provided your music is good of course).

Another reason why you’ll want to get on these sites is to promote credibility. If you tell people they can buy your music from Itunes, they’re bound to take you a lot more seriously then if you tell them you can buy it from your own website. While you will still make sales if you only direct people to your website, the social proof that Itunes provides will make people more likely to check it out.

Finally, Itunes and Amazon MP3 make it easier for people to buy your music. Many people already shop at Amazon and the Itunes store by Apple, so buying a song from their will be familiar with people. This will mean they’re more likely to buy, as they already feel comfortable with the process. If they’re buying from your own personal website however, they may not trust it as much and therefore decide not to buy.

So now we know why we should get our music on Itunes, Spotify and the other big online digital download stores, let’s look at how we’d go about doing that.

How To Get Your Music On Spotify, The Amazon MP3 Store, Itunes And More

The easiest way to get your music on Itunes and the other mentioned music stores, is to go through a digital distributor. This is a third party company that will distribute your music to a number of shops and chase them up for the money on your behalf. They provide reporting, as well pay you out on a monthly basis.

The best digital distributor I’ve come across is Songcast (Free to sign up to). They’re easy to use, and distribute to some of the biggest shops online (Itunes, Amazon MP3 store, Napster, Spotify, Emusic, Rhapsody and MediaNet). They allow you to keep track of every thing in a single dashboard, so you can see all your sales and stats in one easy to manage place. If you haven’t already got a Songcast Music account, sign up for free via the above link to try them out.

Best Way To Distribute Music?

Quite simply, using Songcast is the best way to distribute music online. It’s free to create an account, and easy to use when you’re ready to distribute your music. We provide a review of this service below:

Songcast Review

I wanted to quickly review Songcast Music for you so you know how good it really is. Some of the features Songcast Music provide include:

• Distribution to the biggest music digital download stores online.
• A free UPC barcode, required to sell your music on these music stores (Some other services charge for this UPC).
• The ability to sign up for a free trial.
• A single dashboard to keep track of all your sales and statistics (There’s no logging into various store sites to keep up with what’s going on).
• The ability to keep 100% of the money you make. Most other digital distribution sites take a cut of your money.
• Front page feature. You have the chance of getting featured on the front of the high traffic Songcast website, giving you extra exposure and potentially more sales.
• Royalty retention. The rights of your music stay with you, you don’t have to sign over anything.
• Personal profile and social media integration. You can create your own Songcast profile where people can buy your music, as well as integrating them with Facebook Twitter, your mailing list service and more.
• And much more.

I’ve been using Songcast for a number of months now (You may have seen me talking about them in some of my previous posts), and have been nothing but impressed with their service and customer service. If you’re looking for fast and effective digital music distribution, Songcast is the distributors for you.

Get On Itunes The Easy Way

As I mentioned above, Using Songcast is how you get on Itunes, Amazon MP3, Spotify, and Napster with minimum effort on your part. If you haven’t already signed up for your free account, do so now and get on itunes.

Can You Get Your Music On Itunes Free?

Some people have asked me in the past if you can get your music on Itunes for free. The simple answer is no. First of all you need a UPC. This is required so sales and plays of your music can be tracked.

Using a digital distribution service such as Songcast is the best way to go about getting your music on Itunes, as they provide you with a free UPC and do all the leg work for you. The also get your music on Napster, Spotify, Amazon MP3 and more. It really is set and forget, and is the best way to get your music in online music shops.

How To Get Your Music On Itunes Conclusion

If you’re serious about getting yourself out there, you need to get your music in the biggest online music shops. In other words, you need to get on itunes. People are used to buying music from places like Itunes and Amazon, so doing so won’t feel out of the ordinary to them. This will mean more sales of your music and wider exposure. It will also mean instant credibility.

So now you know how to get your music on Itunes, Amazon MP3, Spotify and more, you simply upload it to Songcast and let them do all the hard work!