51-Places to put your music

Websites to put your music

OK, you’ve created your fantastic tracks/remixes; now, how to get them out there so that the world can marvel at them?

There are lots of ways. A real simple one, if you’re already into Myspace, is to use that services artist features. I don’t use them or know much about them, so I’ll have to refer you to there if that’s your route. If it is you probably already know a lot more about it thatn I do anyway. A lot of famous and successful acts have a big presence on that site, so I’m not going to get all snobbish and look down my nose at it.

Besides that, there is no lack of music-specific sites that offer all kinds of web labels, etc. to surf. But I don’t know if there’s very much information about: what sites are out there to upload, promote and possibly “monetize” your music.

I think a lot depends on your genre: that is, if you’re a folkie/filkie, rap/urban/hip hop artist, or in some other special category, you probably have your own favorite sites already.

I guess I fall into some other category then. If you’re interesting in hearing my tunes, great. If not, I expect you’ll move on rather than waste your time harshing on them.

I’ve already looked at this a little bit, and wrote my impressions in a MS Word file. I’ve converted it to this fancy OpenOffice ODT format (since that’s what WordPress seems to approve of) and I’ll stick it here until I can convert it to “proper” HTML.

Here it is in “odt” format (if you have Open Office Write): Places to put your music (OpenOffice Writer format)

We’ll try to insert an HTML version of this soon for those of you who don’t have Open Office.

(Incidentally, I removed the section about “Caution about last.fm”. I never saw the alarming popups that I once did and I have to believe they weren’t related to that site. So I’m back to recommending them.)

This is a summary of places on the net for musicians to upload and share and/or possibly sell their music. It’s mainly oriented towards musicians who have the “albums composed of individual tracks” model rather than “DJs creating dance music/remixing” model.

There’s no claim made that this is 100% accurate or up to date in any way, please use at your own risk. In fact sites and features change so quickly you could spend full time just keeping this page up to date — and so far I don’t see any offers of a full-time salary to do that.

soundcloud

I still love bandcamp (see below) to death, but for a higher octane tool for moving audio files for professionals, check out this site. One of the best things about it is its wordpress integration is even cooler than bandcamp’s (at least at the moment.) See http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2009/08/13/soundcloud/

bandcamp

I just happened on this a little while ago. I wrote a few notes which you can read in the posts section on this site: My notes about bandcamp.com

“last.fm”

Site

Deal

Notes

last.fm

Free
streaming/merchant site

Pretty
advanced. Allows you to decide how to stream/charge/allow
downloads/promotion

“Createspace”

Not a music site per se; the place where you upload your digital music so it can be sold on Amazon. Requires you to enter your SSN and street address for royalty payments which makes me a bit nervous.

Site

Deal

Notes

createspace.com

Amazon’s
captive download house. Mp3 download section is new, setup is
free. Looks professional, like all their subcompanies

20081109:
You have to enter my SSN and street address for royalty payments.
Makes me a little nervous.

Formats:

Audio:
44.1k aiff or 320kbps MP3. See notes below for detailed specs

Image:
1488×1488 JPEG for album cover

“amiestreet”

Site

Deal

Notes

amiestreet.com

Unusual
model: songs start out free and rise in price until 0.98.
amiestreet takes 1st $5 and 70% thereafter

20081031:
attempting to set up 2 albums; uploading failing. It seems to work at the office though (??)

20081106:
I seem to have this working. The warnings from the uploads are due to too low bitrate on the MP3s. Can replace later…

Sort
of clunky looking at the moment, especially compared to
createspace. Lots of little features missing.

Formats:

Audio:
min 128 kbps MP3
optimal 192 kbps MP3

Images:
216×216px JPEG

“acidplanet”

Site

Deal

Notes

acidplanet.com

not
able to organize in terms of albums

20081030:
added a song or two from the new project. Sort of a rough and
ready place. It’s weird because you can’t upload the
MP3 version until you upload a WMA version (!?)

Formats:

Audio:
you must first upload a WMA format version

Then
min 128 kbps MP3
optimal 192 kbps MP3

Main
artist page image: 200×555 gif or jpg, 100KB max

Song
icons: 70×70px gif or jpg, 30KB max

“Soundclick”

Site

Deal

Notes

soundclick.com/
timpscott

pretty
flexible and well-working interface. Has pay option for tracks;
artist sets price; they get 30%. Songs can be priced as low as
0.25, albums from 2.99

Needs
some work. 20081031: Put up a couple songs… There’s
always work to be done. Need to set up albums, singles to sell,
re-encode “broken” songs, upload new icons/images,
causing browser crash, etc.

Formats:

Images:
Songs 100×100px jpg

“Soundcloud”

Site

Deal

Notes

soundcloud.com

limitations:
not a store. Just a place to dump songs. also not able to organize
in terms of albums. Cons: seem to have to upload songs one at a
time. But does have a sets feature to group songs…

20081112:
has potential. Probably a better place to park tunes than
skydrive. No size limitations on files. People can go there and
play files immediately…skydrive they have to download them.
Cool embeddable player. (You grab the HTML and paste it into a web
page. [But where does it end up?])

Formats:

Audio:
any

Images:
any

Skydrive

This is also just a big file sharing site – this one is part of Microsoft (their “Live” suite)

Site

Deal

Notes

skydrive.live.
com

They’ve
increased the free storage space to 25GB – but the stupid
thing limits each file to <50 MB. So if I want to store a large
amount of data I have to split up the files using WinZip
(fortunately it’s simple in that application) and upload the
pieces in groups

Fine as long as you
don’t save long songs. Also video people are going to have a
problem with the 50 MB file size restriction…I may be a
nice guy and upload some of the tunes as OGG files to a skydrive
folder for Live people to download…

On
20081107 I uploaded the “Synthetic” group and 6 of the
“Primordial” group to a couple of Public folders and
only announced them on the Live forum.

20081210
They fixed the problem of it going down a lot, but they still need
to fix the problem of it not sending the links out when you select
that option.

drop.io

A place to drop large files – it’s hard to figure out from their site but there appears to be a 100MB size limit (unless you sign up, etc.)

Site

Deal

Notes

http://drop.io

Not
sure what the maximum size is … it’s hard to tell
from the site. But it doesn’t appear to have a 100 MB per
file limit?

CDbaby

This place is unique in that it’s designed to give you a place to sell physical CDs. I’ve used their service for years and it’s the best of its kind (if not the only one of its kind that survives…)

Site

Deal

Notes

cdbaby.net
(this is the URL to get to the artist area)

Really,
only a place to sell physical CDs. However, they do ship the audio
files to a large number of online stores (iTunes, Rhapsody, etc.)

Links:

All
my released (physical) CDs

http://www.cdbaby.com/all/rasputin

other

(probably need to be completely free to be interesting here)

Lulu

Print-on-demand house

Virb

Free to sign up

Pay option

Customization option

Sheesh..These guys
seem to be enamored of the minuscule (2 pixel high) fonts. Allows
a lot of customization.

Rhapsody?

iTunes?

Napster?

Ampcast?

Reverbnation

Jamendo

Free/CC site

Archive.org

Very huge archive of
free albums, tracks, samples, etc.

Page#51 / last edited 20091026