While there’s no prizes for guessing what the book is about (The clue is in the title), there is a prize for three lucky readers of Independent Music Advice! Three of you will get a copy of “How To Make Money From Free Music” sent directly to their inbox. The retail price for this book is currently $29.99 (Price guaranteed for the first week only, after that it may go up) but you can get your hands on it by taking a few simple steps:

1. Go over to the Facebook page for Independent Music Advice and click ‘Like’,
2. Head over to out Free Gift page and sign up to our mailing list.
   Note: Please make sure you use the same email address that your Facebook account is with so we can confirm that you’ve signed up to both. When you sign up to our list you’ll receive a free copy of the “Independent Musician Success” ebook as well as exclusive weekly music advice, so it’s worth it for that alone
3. Leave a message on our Facebook wall telling us a bit about your music career (Maybe your biggest achievement, maybe what you’re working towards etc) as well as stating you want a free copy of the ebook.

And that’s it. That’ll take around 2 minuets to do, but could gain you free access to some of the most valuable music advice we’ve produced!

If you’re still not sure what this book is about, you can find out more about How To Make Money From Free Music here. Best of luck!

Please Note:
Entries close Saturday the thirteenth of November 2010 at 11.59pm.
Winners will be picked at random and notified on the Sunday via Facebook or Email.
If you’ve already purchased a copy of the book and you win we’ll refund your original purchase.
The editors decision is final.

How To Prevent MP3 Downloads

OK, so I know some of you will have found this article by looking for a way to prevent MP3 downloads from happening. But what if I told you there was a better way to go about it, a way for you to actually make money from people downloading your music for free? Well there is, and I’ll be telling you how I and an increasing amount of independent musicians now go about doing that.

In all honesty, it seems that music downloads are here to stay. You can try and avoid the download of your music as much as you want, but if some one really wants to download it without paying for it they can. The end result is you lose out on money, as well as a lot of time trying to prevent that MP3 download. A better way would be to feed people’s downloading habits, and make money each time someone downloads your music for free. So instead of asking how to prevent mp3 downloading, you should instead be asking:

How To Make Money From Free Music

So, how do you make money from people’s need for free downloads? Well, I’ve written a full book detailing step by step exactly how to do this (This book is called ‘How To Make Money From Free Music‘ if you’re interested in seeing that), but I’ll give you a quick over run of the system here and now

First of all, you need to have a place where you can put your download links. These download links are the ones you’ll be giving out to your fans, so making sure people can get them all from one site is very important. Ideally you want your own self hosted website so people have a easy to remember place to get your new music from, but free websites work too. If you haven’t already got a website, you can make a top quality one by following our free guide How To Build Your Own Website (Link opens in a new window). While it’ll cost a little bit of money to make a website using this method (Around $50-$100 depending on the options you choose) if you was to get someone else to make the same type of site for you it could easily cost you over $600. If you haven’t got the budget to spend on a website though, you can always make a free website using WordPress.com.

Next, you have to make special links that allow you to track and be paid every time your music is downloaded from them. It is very important that you direct people to these links, as if they download your music with any other links, you won’t get paid for their download. Once you’ve created these links, you then put them on your website. Whenever some one downloads your music from one of your links (Which is free for them to do) you get paid directly into your account. You can find out more about how to create these links and this process in the book How To Make Money From Free Music.

Next, you have to get visitors back to your website. There’s no point having links with your music on if no one ever sees them. Use a combination of search engines and social marketing to get short and long-term traffic back to your website, and get more people seeing your links. The more traffic you get, the more people will see your links and the more people will download. And of course, the more people that download via your links, the more money you make!

The full process of how to do this is in the book “How To Make Money From Free Music”. We also show you advanced strategies on how to squeeze the most money from each fan (It’s actually by being honest with them and providing them a better service [Which still doesn’t cost them anything], so it’s win win for both of you).

Does This Prevent MP3 Downloads?

While there’s nothing coming any time soon that will completely stop MP3 downloads, the methods used in the ebook How To Make Money From Free Music are a great new way for musicians to make money by giving out free downloads. The more people download your music, the more money you can make. And come on, how hard is it to get people to download your music for free? Making money from people downloading your music is better then trying to prevent MP3 download, so give it a try.