Online music marketing resources
January 19th, 2008 by Niklas Rämö // Got anything to say?
The “magic” that record companies in practice do is marketing and distributing your music with the help of their vast marketing and distribution networks. Getting your potential fans to listen to your music is a really big dilemma for many unsigned and independent musicians, but thanks to the Internet there are some really useful music marketing, distribution and licensing services that can help you with this big task.
Social networking websites
Still one of the most important promotion tools for your music, because of the sheer amount of users.
Massive amount of active users. There are some useful extra applications to promote your music with, such as iCast (by iLike), which allows you to send bulletins across many social networks simultaneously. Create your musician profile at Facebook Pages.
The next generation MySpace offering musicians their own special pages. Customizing the visual layout is pretty easy and overall the profiles look much cleaner than on MySpace. Discovering new music is also made fairly easy with the Band Surf feature, which displays other similar artists while you’re viewing band profiles. Bebo also shows charts of the top 1000 major label, indie label and unsigned bands or you can just browse the charts by genre also.
One of the best music focused online communities around. Basically like MySpace, but with more features and more attractive visual design.
The best on-demand online radio with great social networking features. This is the future of discovering new music. Submit your own music to Last.fm here.
A social network inside other social networks meaning that you can integrate your iLike profile to many other social networking websites such as Bebo, Facebook and Hi5 (MySpace and Orkut coming soon). Instead of collecting fans separately on each social networking website, you can now collect fans to one destination through many different social networks.
Very similar to MySpace, but visually more attractive and more customizable.
A social music network offering street team management tools and useful widgets to embed on other sites. I especially recommend using the Tunewidget, which they modestly call “the mother of all widgets”.
A mashup music service, which connects artists and fans. The promotional tools you get in Fuzz are not so revolutionary, but the service has a clean and functional interface.
A music promotion platform that resembles Fuzz a lot. Both services offer a blog, a music player and a list of upcoming shows, so they are pretty much the same service with just different layout and design.
A great way to promote and discover new music. Post your songs to iJigg, embed and share the music player widgets and collect votes from listeners.
Online music distribution
Pioneers of selling indie music online. CD Baby sells your CDs and also covers digital distribution with a 9% cut of all the digital distribution income your music generates. In the case of CDs they keep $4 for each sold CD. The strong point of CD Baby is its popularity.
A free music distribution platform offering an embeddable audio player and a buzz team, which will spread your music to other like minded people. As for the revenue model Jamendo shares (optionally) advertisement revenue with you and provides your fans a chance to donate money to you. When you upload your music to Jamendo you have to choose one of Creative Commons licenses, which means that people can copy, distribute and transmit your music freely.
Distributes and markets your music (CD’s and digital music) through various channels and gives you 50% of all gross income they make with your music. When you make a deal with Magnatune your music is licensed with a predefined Creative Commons license. The deal is non-exclusive, which means that you retain the right to use your songs for other purposes. A good incentive from Magnatune is that they also try to license your music to games, movies and commercials.
An online music store, which distributes music also through entertainment hubs placed that are placed in airports, hotels, music stores etc. These hubs are great way to reach those music consumers who are not yet familiar with online music stores. Go here to sign up for Prefueled Unsigned.
Distributes your music to the biggest online music stores such as iTunes, Rhapsody, Napster etc. Charges $0.99 per song (one time charge), $0.99 per store per album (one time charge) and $9.98 per album maintenance and storage (per year). You 100% of the royalties generated by sales of your recordings.
Very similar to Tunecore, but cheaper. Charges a one-off payment (£24.95 to £49.95) per release depending on the amount of tracks and passes on to you 100% of the royalties generated by sales of your recordings.
Online music licensing
An online music licensing service that licenses independent music to television, advertising, film etc. The deal is non-exclusive, you get 50% of the revenue your music generates, 1-year term, no submission fee and you retain full ownership to your songs. To me Pump Audio looks very attractive, because they work with many high profile ad agencies, TV networks and production companies from all over the world such as Nike, IBM ad MTV.
Describing itself as “an online music licensing marketplace”, YouLicense is definitely worth a try. They license your music to films, television, commercials, websites etc. and take only 9% commission for the service. You also retain full ownership to your songs since the deal is non-exclusive.
Licenses your music to film, TV, video games, advertising and marketing campaigns, podcasts, video blogs, background usage etc. Non-exclusive licensing agreement, 1-year term, you retain full ownership to your songs and you get 50% of the net licensing fees.
An online music store and licensing service. BeatPick splits earnings 50/50 with their artists and the agreement is non-exclusive.
