Resources In This Article:
SongCast: An online distributor that will get your music into ITunes, Napster and many more.
E-Junkie: A way of selling your music as a digital download via your own website.
One option to sell your music via a online shop. This is an increasingly popular option as it plays on one of the most popular methods of music consumption: downloading. Many record labels have come to accept that downloading will be around for the foreseeable future, so have offered their music for digital download but on their terms.
Anyone can sell their music online, that’s the beauty of it. It doesn’t need your own website (Although many artists do choose to use their own site to sell their music), there are many existing site which you can sell your music through. The best way I’ve found to sell music onlinethough is through your own website via a automated digital download service such as E-Junkie. E-junkie allows you to sell music via your own website even when you’re not around. You simply upload your song or album to your E-Junkie account, create a button to buy your music, and put the button on your website. When anyone clicks and buys your music through this button they are automatically sent your music as a download (Once they’ve paid of course). I’ve found this to be a very useful tool as you can leave the selling of your downloads on auto pilot without having to manually send each download yourself.
If you haven’t got your own website however and aren’t willing to make one, the other option is selling your music via exsisting download websites such as ITunes or Napster (We’ve written an extensive article on how to get your music on iTunes here). Some of these music download websites offer as much as 70% of the profit back to you (Considering it doesn’t cost you anything to put your music on the site in the first place it’s all profit). Others offer you a less percentage but may be favorable for another reason (E.G. It may be a more well known site with already loyal customers which may buy your product).
Now it may seem like the best option is to get your music on all sites to reach as many people as possible, but this isn’t the case. Many sites have a minimum payment threshold, which means they won’t pay you till you have made a certain amount of money. Let’s imagine for example the minimum payment threshold was £100 for each of 10 different sites. If you used one of those sites to sell your music and you made £100 you would get paid. Now let’s say you used all 10 websites to sell your music and you made £100 across all the sites, you wouldn’t have made enough money to withdraw until you made another £90 for each site. This of course isn’t ideal as you’d want to withdraw your money as soon as possible.
There is a way around this however. If you sign up to an online music distributor you can earn money from multiple website such as ITunes, Amazon MP3 and Napster and withdraw the money no matter what site your music sold on. My favourite website to distribute music is SongCast. This is because they distribute your music to the main websites with big traffic and allow you to withdraw your money regularly. Use the following link to get a free SongCast account.