What you find when you Google “Sell Your Music Online”

I plan for this to be a series of articles reviewing the various methods and services out there for musicians to sell their music online.
Currently what do you find when you Google “Sell Your Music Online”?
Well, hopefully, eventually, this website! But in the meantime:
1. Companies selling you a service
2. Sites with out of date info
3. Sites with not very in depth articles.

It’s pretty much the same when you Google “Sell Your Music” or simply “Sell Music”
I thought perhaps a more up to date, more in depth review of this important topic of how to sell ones music online might be in order.
It’s probably pretty obvious what musicians are looking for when they Google “sell your music online”. But lets review.
(Please excuse the obviousness of some of this, but I need to break it down in order to focus each future article on each aspect of selling ones music.)

The Various Places A Musician Can Sell Their Music Online

From your website
From your social network page like Facebook, Myspace etc…
From a musicians community type website
From some other 3rd party site like CD Baby
Directly to (from) someones email

What are You Trying To Sell?

MP3s
CDs
Sheet Music (as a digital download and a hard copy)
Other merchandise
Concert Tickets
YOUR BRAND!

Each upcoming article will focus on a different aspect of the above topics.
I will only be looking at companies that have been around awhile.
I will try to evaluate their services but hopefully I’ll get feedback from those of you who have used their services.
As I’ve said in a previous post , I prefer as FEW MIDDLE MEN AS POSSIBLE between the product and the consumer!
Next article coming soon…….

Welcome Musicians and all!
This website is dedicated to researching and reviewing the variety of tools and services out there on the net for selling and promoting your original music online. There are many!

I’m a “do-it-yourself” person, especially when it comes to ones web presence and selling ones music online.

For me it started when I wanted to sell some of my own music as an MP3 download performed by the musical saw player Natalia ‘Saw Lady’ Paruz. www.SawLady.com and www.SawLady.com/blog

We already had a CD of Christmas music out and on CD baby and so we signed up for their free digital distribution program.

But she gets alot of hits to her site and I wanted to offer to sell MP3 downloads of our music directly from her site WITHOUT A MIDDLE MAN! (other then PayPal)

The problem I saw with the variety of 3rd party services and systems out there for selling MP3s were the following:

1. They take too much of the pie
2. Some charge a monthly fee
3. I didn’t want to send the potential customer away from her site to another site to buy the download – a sure way to kill a sale!
4. The sale must be as quick and painless as possible. I decided to stick with Paypal as many people already have a Paypal account and/or trust them. Also most if not all of those “3rd Party” services (such as LuLu.com and others) require the customer to ‘sign-up’ for an account – another sure way to kill the sale!
5. The customer must get their download IMMEDIATELY ie: be sent to a download page AND receive download links to the MP3′s in their email.
6. The system shan’t be limited to MP3′s but cable of delivering any digital goods (sheet music in this case in the form of pdf’s) as well as Physical goods in the same sale (ie: CDs or T-shirts etc.)
7. These companies often go out of business – what happened to all those MP3s you uploaded to their server? And if you mailed them CDs where are your CDs? Check out this story about the collapse of Awarestore.com http://cdbaby.org/stories/08/01/22/2189202.html

After many, many, months of “research and development” so to speak I achieved all this and am happy to say we sell quite a few downloads from her website every year. Once I finally get around to re-doing her site and putting the “digital store” in the side bar on every page of her site I know our sales will increase.

I realize many musicians don’t want to put in the tech time learning this stuff and are happy to go with the “Middle-Men”. To be a little self promotional, if you have your own site I can, for a small fee, set up a Digital Store for you and give you instructions on how to add futre MP3s, CDs, etc. to it yourself. So though at first I might be the “Middle-Man” once it’s set up and you learn how to add future MP3s etc. to it, which isn’t difficult, you can cut me out as well!

I’m amazed at how many Indie Musicians/ Bands don’t offer an easy to use, easy to find way for their fans to buy their music as downloads – or even in CD format from their website.

In my opinion every Indie Band/ soloist should have their own site. It’s so cheap these days. MySpace pages or profile pages on some site with 100′s of other bands – like “LuLu.com” are just too easy for a fan to get distracted and click away from you and surf away into ethernet……….