7 main streams of Internet resources for Music
(General)
By No on 07/25/2008
Is it even enough to say that the business of music has changed? Over the past, independent songwriters have been entrusted with very delicate task: the full control of their future. However, using the Internet for Music Business can really be time-consuming. There are many resources out there, and to dive into the whole thing without proper selection would probably make a big mistake. Let’s try to use a little planning and decision-making to go through 7 main streams of Internet resources for Music.

Promotion on Networking SitesThe 3 main networking websites are MySpace (www.myspace.com), YouTube (www.youtube.com) and Facebook (www.facebook.com). MySpace is the only one among the 3 to have a specific community, and a format for musicians. YouTube is the video specialist, a good way to centralize your videos, and “embed” (integrate) them into your website’s pages, and your MySpace. Facebook seems to be more and more a local community site. Create a group for your band or subscribe to a group within your city, and post messages or send invites to all the group members at once.

Digital and Physical distribution (1/2)This is the CD Baby arena (www.cdbaby.net to register your music and www.cdbaby.com to search for music. However, two new competitors are worth some attention: SNOCAP (www.snocap.com%5B/url%29%20and%20Tunecore%20%28%5Burl%5Dwww.tunecore.com). CD Baby allows you to manage both physical and digital sales for a one-time fee of $35. They also have many agreements with other digital music companies such as iTunes, Rhapsody, Amazon, Napster… They will automatically, and on a regular basis, send your music to their partners for distribution. No additional fee for this service, but they keep 9% of what these companies pay them when they sell your music.

Digital and Physical distribution (2/2)Tunecore doesn't have a physical distribution service, and focuses on digital. They charge $0.99 per track, $0.99 per store per album, and $19.98 per album per year storage and maintenance. You can also put up one song as a single for a flat price of $9.99 per year. It allows musicians to upload their songs, copy the html code provided, then plug their “Store” on their own website or MySpace. You don’t need to have a physical CD, or rely on other websites than your own to sell your CDs! It's useful to have a dedicated PayPal account to cash the sales.

Internet RadiosThe leaders in this category are Pandora (www.pandora.com) and Live365 (www.live365.com). With more and more listeners every month, it's becoming a very serious trend! There are still ongoing discussion regarding rights and royalties, but it will become a great way for songwriters to reach a new audience. Internet radio does not mean “less professional”, and these radios have their submission policies, and require good quality recordings. The concept behind Pandora is to allow you to create your own stations based on the music you like, live365 is a sort of group of stations of all genres.