In an era where social media is a finger-click away and virtually everyone has a smart phone of one kind or another, it’s hard to make your band stand out in a sea of artists fighting for a chance to be heard.

A few years ago I was offered the opportunity to head up the marketing and promotion for an agency based in New York City. They needed a competent go-getter (me) to handle not only the Chicago market, but the Midwestern United States as a whole. Additionally, I was in charge of establishing and maintaining Street Teams for a number of the artists on their roster – both well known and unknown – for the entire US.

This was a prospect which had me giddy with anticipation until the catch came: I was to do all of this with virtually no budget (Read: Money).

Here are a few things I learned. Hopefully, enumerating on my experiences will prove helpful for a few.

Ask For Help Promoting Your Band

This may seem rudimentary but it really is that simple.

If you aren’t yet at a stage in your career at which you’ve got managers, promoters, and a PR team to help you with such things, ask around to see who may be willing to lend a hand. There are always students at universities studying music business, management, marketing, or advertising who need proverbial guinea pigs to learn the basics from.

I myself have began working with and for several people this way. The beauteous part being, such people will typically help you for free.

You can also ask within your family and circle of friends – can someone pass out flyers advertising an upcoming gig? Can you get a group of friends together and give out sampler CDs or mix tapes?

See if shops, clubs, cafés, restaurants, hotel lounges, and any establishment you can possibly imagine will play your music for their clientèle. One band I was promoting played music that was very avant-garde, yet still calm and a bit serene at times. I read about a new “hotspot” hotel that everyone was going to and went to talk the manager about them. I told him about the band and how I thought the music would be a great addition to the ambience. And guess what? He played their music!

A band that would have gotten virtually no radio play in Chicago still got heard by hundreds of people, because I asked. Manners and a smile go a very long way. that will never change.

More importantly, it’s free!

Many college students have spare time and are fairly open to new music. Take advantage of this!

I would literally walk around college campuses with an iPod and headphones to let people hear the new artists I was promoting. I got response on the artists and the people got to listen to new, up and coming acts (And let’s face it, who doesn’t like to say they heard someone before they were “known”).

If possible, I would hand out stickers, buttons, and CD samplers. Any swag that I had, no matter how small. People love getting things, even something as simple as a sticker to say “Thank you for your time, give our band money”.

In my travels, I also found that college radio stations are more than willing and eager to work with artists on just about anything. They have airtime to fill, requirements to meet, and they want to host the “hottest” radio show around. If they can get a few handfuls of CDs, free download codes, or the aforementioned stickers and buttons to give away to listeners, they are often very grateful.

If you have upcoming gigs, even better. Everyone wants to say they were on the guest list for the “insert your band name here” show last night. Letting a person or two into a gig for free could pay off en masse if they tell all of their friends to join them and make a night of it (Which, in my experience, frequently happens).

Get A Street Team For Your Band

Street teams can be a wonderful tool for an act with a slightly established following. Music fans talk about the music they enjoy, and you don’t have to pay them to do it. Use word of mouth chatter among fans and peers as a powerful marketing machine!

If your band alone hasn’t quite established the fan base for an entire street team, why not partner up with similar artists in your city and create a “your city” street team? (Editor’s Note: Great tip I hadn’t even thought about, thanks Christine ).

Do keep in mind, for street teams to be effective, organisation is key. Keeping track of what members are where and what they’re working on (I.e. Passing out flyers for an upcoming gig, emailing local radio about getting your track played, etc) is very important. Delegate tasks to people according to their strengths and comfort levels. Some people love talking to people and would love to hang out at a venue and pass out flyers to the audience of a gig letting out. Others may be better at emailing and making phone calls for you. The more at ease someone is, the better they’ll be at the task at hand.

Be Social With Fans

By “social” I’m not necessarily referring to social media. While sites like Twitter and Facebook are invaluable tools, I don’t believe they are a replacement for actual, human contact (Gasp)!

While it’s wonderful for artists to be actively involved in communicating with fans on the internet, I believe it takes many elements to successfully promote a project, and therefore requires several different approaches. A huge part of why fans love to follow their favourite artists on Twitter on Facebook is to get the sense of being involved and feeling connected to them.

Nothing can provide this more than actually interacting with them in person.

Many artists figured this out long ago. They aren’t playing stadiums, but do enjoy a successful career as full-time musicians with a devout fan base. After each show, you’ll find band members at the merchandise booth signing autographs, taking photographs, and generally chatting it up with their fans.

It may be nice to get a Twitter update from someone, but those are the types of interactions that fans really appreciate and which will lead them to them spending more money on your product.

It also takes very little effort for the artist to spend a few minutes before or after a gig to say a few “hellos”, shake a few hands, and be pleasant to the people paying their wages. You can be a multi-platinum selling act with the greatest management and promotional team behind you, but nothing can replace the artist-fan relationship. Use this to your advantage!

What Happens If You’re Not Part Of The Band?

For those not in the band but rather promoting them, the same basic principal applies. It really all comes down to being kind and friendly, as it’s amazing how far this will go. Again, manners and a smile go a very long way.

Also, it’s important to keep in mind that you’re representing the artist(s). Whether working directly for an artist or for a marketing firm or label, remember, it’s still business. You can absolutely have fun while promoting music, be it your own or someone else’s, but always, ALWAYS be professional.

The key to any of these tactics is to utilise any resources available to you. It’s amazing how many fans you can find if you’re willing to do a bit of work! That’s all for now, I hope you found these tips useful. Please leave any additional advice in the comments section below.

Christine Infanger is a music and music industry devotee based in Chicago. In the past, she has worked for various Indie labels and marketing companies promoting a range of artists.

Find her on Twitter @NoraBarnacle or contact here via crinfanger @ gmail.com

If you’ve ever wanted to know how to sell music online, you’re in the right place! Today we’ll be looking at how to take your digital songs, and put them up for sale in multiple places. Once your songs are up, everything runs on autopilot. There’s no need to stand by and manually send every song that’s bought from you, the systems we will show you handle everything on your behalf.

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.

Today we’re going to look at how to get your music on Itunes, the Amazon MP3 store, Spotify, Napster, and many other big online music shops using Songcast (Free to sign up to). This guide is a long-time over due, as getting your music out there to the masses should be an essential part of your music strategy. If you make it hard for people to find and buy your music, you will lose out on sales.

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!

If you’re a new musician or haven’t yet released your first independent CD or vinyl, you may not have come across the term ‘sale or return’ (Or SOR for short). In this article we will be looking at what a sale or return deal is, an example of a sale or return deal, and how to get one.
There are two types of deals you can get when trying to get your music into record shops, a ‘money upfront’ deal, and a sale or return deal. With a money upfront deal, a record shop will buy your CDs from you and give you the money upfront. They then re-sell these CDs for an increased price, keeping all the money they make from them. As the CDs now belong to the record shop, they can sell them for any price they want or even give them away for free if they so choose. While many musicians like upfront deals as they make instant bulk sales, this type of deal is becoming more rare for independent musicians. The only way independent musicians are really seeing upfront deals is if they have a proven record of selling large amounts of CDs, or if they go through a distributor (We’ll look a bit at distributor deals in this post too).

If you don’t get a money upfront deal, the other option is getting a sale or return deal. This is when you give the record shop a set amount of units to sell, but instead of them paying you upfront for these CDs, they take them in and give you money for however many units they sell. The rest of the CDs they don’t sell after a certain amount of time they give back to you.

An Example Of A Sale Or Return Deal

Here’s an example of a sale or return deal. Let’s say a record shop asks you to give them 100 units of your CD which they will sell for £6 per unit. Typically, they will give you half of the selling price for each unit sold within a set period of time, say 3 months. So let’s assume your CD sells 59 units in this shop by the time this 3 month period is over. For each of these 59 units you will receive £3, and £3 x 59 = £177. This means you will receive £177 plus the remaining 41 CDs that didn’t sell once the 3 months are over.

An Example Of A Distributor Deal

If you were going through a distributor however, the deal may look more like this. A distributor will have a listen to your CD and see if they want to distribute it or not. If they decide to, you will sort out how many units you’ll be giving them as well as how much you’ll both get per unit. Let’s say the distributor says they’re going to charge shops £3.50 to buy your CDs from them. Usually the distributor will take £1 for themselves for every unit they sell and give you the remaining £2.50. So if they take in 100 units and get 75 of those into shops, you’ll get £187.50 and the remaining 25 units they couldn’t get into the shops for you.

This differs from a SOR deal in the sense that anything the distributor gets the shops to take in they’ll get paid upfront for. This means you’ll also get paid upfront once the distributor has done their job, whether or not the shop sells your CDs. Notice that in this example the distributor is charging the shop a higher price then what you would get in a SOR deal. This is because A) Distributors have built up a relationship with the shop and are probably known for giving the shops only the best material, and B) Because once the shop have the CD they can usually sell it for any price they see fit.

Keeping Your Music In Shops After The Sale Or Return Deal Is Over

Sometimes you can get the shop to extend the period of the SOR deal, but if you or the shop don’t think any more units can be sold it may be best to take the CDs out and try and sell them elsewhere. It’s a good idea however to keep a few copies of your CD in the more popular shops even after your hype has died down, and there are a few good reasons for this:

1. It’s Good To Have A Real World Presence.
   Many musicians forget that not everyone has access to a computer. While it’s important to have your music available to buy online, giving people the option to go to their local record shop and pick up a nicely packaged copy of your CD is also important. So leaving maybe five copies of your CD in the more popular record shops (After your sales have slowed down and your SOR deal has expired) will mean people still have access to your music in a variety of ways.
2. Being In Shops Provide Credibility.
   Having your CDs for sale in shops makes your music more credible to some people, importantly to many key industry figures you may come along. Many record labels for example are more likely to sign a talented person who they can see has put the work in. If there’s two equally talented musicians, one having released their CDs into shops while the other hasn’t done much, which one is the record label more likely to sign?
   When you release your music into shops you’re more likely to get access to a better quality of collaboration as well. If you can show producers and vocalists you can get them free exposure by getting them on your CD (Which will be going into shops potentially worldwide), you’ve a much higher chance of getting good collaborations then if you were just releasing your music on your MySpace page.
3. You Get A Back Catolog Of CDs.
   As you release more CDs you’ll obviously gain more fans (It is possible for the number of your fans to wither away as you release more material, but that’s an issue for another post). These new fans may want to hear some of your earlier releases, meaning you could end up selling copies of previous CDs months or years after they’re released. Some record shops bunch each musician’s CDs together as well, so when someone’s looking for your current release they may end up stumbling apon some of your other releases and buy those too.

How To Get A Sale Or Return Deal

The great thing about sale or return deals is they’re easy to obtain. This is because there’s no risk to the record shops, they can simply take you CD in, and if it doesn’t sell they don’t lose any money. If it does sell however they’re in profit.
Most of the time it’s as easy as ringing up a record shops and arranging a time to come and see them about getting your CD in their for a SOR deal. You then go in there, show them your CD (They may want to hear a sample of your music and / or hear what promo you have or will be doing) and they’ll let you know if they want to take it in or not. If they do you’ll have to fill in some quick paper work which includes details of how many units they take in, the price you’ll receive for each unit sold, and when to come and collect the money / remaining CDs by. You’ll also need to fill out your contact details such as your name and address in case they need to contact you for any reason. You then give them the CDs and that’s it, you rinse and repeat for any shops you want your music in.

Sale or return deals are probably the easiest way of getting your music into shops, and can be a good way for independent musicians to get their music to dedicated music buyers. I hope this article has giving you a good insight into how sale or return deals work, if you have any questions or anything to add please do so in the comments section below.