So you're a musician, and you've got to that stage where you reckon you're worth listening to. You want people to check out your sounds, you want to be heard around the world. Easy. Real easy. Follow this and by the end of next week hundreds of people will have heard your music.

I never thought I would love something as much as music, but the net comes pretty close. It is pretty much like panning for gold - and there is gold there, especially when you read a piece like this that points you straight to it. In the course of the last two weeks I've posted three of my older tunes on all of the following free artist mp3 communities and more that weren't worth a mention, and after registering for their service and uploading the songs, over five hundred different people have downloaded my songs so they can check it out whenever they like and burn it off for their mates! And that's a bit of a buzz when you struggle to sell a hundred cd's!

Yes, endless copies will be burnt off, they are likely to be uploaded elsewhere and fileshared without your knowledge, and very possibly even outright stolen, abused, misused and plagiarized by some maggot. Awesome huh? My peace of mind lies in never putting my best new songs up, only my old best songs, which allows me to retain a certain level of pride in my work, but I don't tend to mention it because it could be a put off. If I've got something really hot that I want people to hear but don't want to devalue, you could always do what the big boys do, and have a really loud voice promoting your act several times through the song. No one's going to listen to that more than a few times though, and given all the music out there, you've got to be really good to retain their interest then.

But uploads take for ages if you got dial-up, we're talking half-an-hour to an hour. Most sites (except download.com) are keen on the standard 128kpbs encoding, which is sweet for listening if the tune is produced well, and you don't want to blast it out. Alot of these sites make threats that you'll be booted out if you do covers or use uncleared samples but just to assure you, bootlegs of the most obvious and blatant quality stalk the charts of many of these sites unabashed.

You'll be asked to supply an image, a bio, similar profile acts for the search engine and a blurb for each song so it pays to prepare all these in advance and just cut and paste them in. Now the thing to realize is that in the real world the first encounter your potential fans have with your music could be hearing it on the bnet or checking out one of your shows. On the net, the first time someone sees your name, it'll be a pic or a 250 character write up, competing with a thousand other pics with 250 character write ups, so it really does pay to get your artsy guy and your English major into action for this. You don't have to have a professional photo shoot, people have photoshop now - turn the contrast up and stick the two-tone over some cool textures in the background - easy! . . . but the blurbs gotta stand out, that's what makes people click your button!
Here's one of mine:

Nag Champa (Further ft. Haze)
Watch Dub and Jazz go at it in a dirty back alley bong fest, as killer trumpets prowl the mix, laced up with luscious snatches from the lovely Haze.

150 characters.
Now doesn't that put a peg in your hole? Right, let's check out the goods:

The Best:

For sheer volume: Download.com. I believe every aspiring musician should have their stuff up on download. Even the most obscure material will be downloaded everyday simply because of the massive amount of traffic generated by internet juggernaut Cnet, who of course brought out mp3.com in 2003, turfed out the indies, and started download for them. Download's popularity is no doubt maintained by it's 192kpbs encoding, however the fact that download doesn't offer streaming means your tune is probably more often downloaded and discarded once the listener decides it's not really what their into. Up to 50mb of songs allowed.

The artist's choice: Audiostreet.net runs a very tight ship, and although a newish site that doesn't get nearly the traffic that Download does, Audiostreet keeps the artists coming back with the most fuss-free yet in-depth artist services of the lot, and still a steady amount of traffic. Only 3 songs allowed on the free service and particularly blase about bootlegs and DJ mixes.

Added Bonus: Unfortunately bands411.com provides no artist stats so disappointingly, there's no way of knowing wether people are actually checking it out or not, or what they're responding to, but really, your own adfree website? I mean most of these communities will give you your own page URL (www.bands411.com/further), but the fact that there is virtually no additional material (ads, promos, click here, click there) other than yours and the interface is fully variable is so refreshing! When I meet people online I tend to send them here, because there's no distractions other than you and your songs. If you don't already have a website, well here you go. 5-6 pages and up to 10 songs.

Homegrown: Amplifier.co.nz is an interest run by Chris "The Lawyer" Hocquard. Can't seem to complete my song uploads but then, I have dial-up. Of course, if you can get in touch with them and send them a demo, they will get round to it. Amplifier has a reasonable amount of traffic, but of course, this is qualified traffic, these are almost all New Zealanders, who'll come to your shows, who'll buy your cd because they want to support kiwi music. Deeper underground there is also nzmp3.com

But . . . but . . . but - the most important thing about amplifier - mark my words - is that they rule google search rankings for music in New Zealand. You google Data:bass and Amplifier will be there. And so, when the google spiders come looking for you and your site, guess how they'll find it?

The Rest:

Amazon.com: Now the thing about Amazon is it's high traffic to artist ratio. Which means huge amounts of traffic is generated by Amazonians hungry for new music but only some 26,000 tunes have been uploaded to the site, which are all likely to see regular downloads. It's not an obvious choice for indie music, and it's easy to speculate that amazon is unlikely to attract the hardcore niche heads or A&R scouts.

Purevolume.com
This is a new and flashy site which also has very high traffic but has a somewhat corporate feel and an endless procession of rockin' new 4-pieces, 5-pieces, and 3-pieces who stare intently into the eyes of the spectator. The Pure Volume service is not great, (fewer details, longer waits for approval) but tunes do upload rather fast. However, their large audience doesn't seem terribly interested in me, and it makes me wonder, especially with these flashier sites, just how "basic" the free service is.

Broadjam.com
Yet another flashy site with less-than-perfect service for free subscribers, and a little bit pushy. The free service works on a review system - you have to review five tunes before a song is made available - but hey, you may get a review back, unfortunately I haven't had time to find out.

Soundclick.com: Soundclick is not all it's cracked up to be. The service is very good, you can add a message board to the pretty much standard mailing list, and big plus for dial uppers, the super "slurp" function, which slurps your mp3 from your home site or wherever onto theirs in a couple of minutes. However, soundclick doesn't generate a great deal of interest though, probably due to artist saturation but again, it's paid service may be worthwhile - nobody illustrating that better than that young kid from Taupo, who claims to be 14 and has almost 200 beats for sale starting at $200 - he's sold a few too. The kid's dangerous - I think my next article will be about him!

In passing, over half of the 100,000 acts on soundclick are Hip-Hop acts, of which there are two major categories and over twenty sub-categories. That's just to let you know in case in 2005 you didn't know what time it is.

IUMA.com: IUMA and it's cousins Vitaminic etc. have long been stalwarts of the independent artist scene, but it is very much a case of lights on, nobody home. The submission response was somewhat frustrating and my profile still hasn't been approved after two weeks. For those that have their accounts up and running, the artist pages do look good.

mp3.com.au: mp3 australia is definitely in a bit of a state. The fact that they've thrown their doors open to the world has meant that the site is completely overloaded and over used - it goes down regularly and is frought with technical errors. It really looks like it could be a great site, especially for us kiwis trying to reach more accessible audiences.
However, freemp3.com.au have just begun accepting deep links (a direct link to your mp3 download somewhere else) but they tend to be oriented toward less "heavier" tunage.

Artistopia.com: Looks like good stuff on offer if you sign up for their paid service, in the vein of many sites that are beginning to creep into freelance A & R with mp3's. But if you don't have a fast connection, don't bother, because they have a time out device that will log you out before you can upload a whole track!

Sectionz.com: Quite a vigourously promoted and conducted new site for electronic producers. Only artists and members have access to tunes uploaded by users of the free service, which again, doesn't exactly make my blood run quicker.

Musicianmp3.com: service is good, but very quiet in terms of traffic.

Mp3unsigned.com: accepts three deep links. No stats, but, which is pretty hard to get excited about.

IDNmusic: Simple Deep links, no stats.

Musicbuilder: Profile is up but songs have still not been approved, like IDNmusic, they're mainly about commissions gained from selling indie artist's CD's, the free mp3 thing is kind of an aside.

Myspace.com: This is a funny one, this is a sort of an online community of some six million, where you can build your own "space" (blogs etc.) and also post your tunes. Not many downloads but I was checking out one of my contemporaries and noticed he had four international Drum'n Bass personalities added to his list of friends. Possibly a great site for contacts . . .

Artistgigs.com/bandlabel.com: These guys need a script or an applet or something of a tumbleweed rolling down their page. The same tunes been at number one since 2003 and apparently their site went down because it was hacked. Yeah, Right.

Not reviewed:

Sonicgarden.com: Recommended. List as a label/collective and have all your artists connected and other benefits - you and your mates and your other identity . . . my label membership still pending . . .

Cornerband.com : Had registering trouble

Garageband.com : Very well regarded again, but not really the place for a purveyor of meaningful chill-out or disco drum'n bass such as myself, I should think. Maybe when I write some more garage . . . bo!

Mixposure: Brand new site. They came to me!

More top promotional info recommended by me:

Temple.co.nz
cdbaby.com
Or check Out Mikhail Norris in NZMusician.

Used by permission of Matt Turner. Copyright 2005. All rights reserved. You can use this article for your site, too, as long as you include

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