Selling Music Online

Advertising and digital music distribution are two things that may work together to allow musicians to give away their music online for free and still make money. I have been thinking about it lately and it may be something I try out with my music online. The obvious benefit of using advertising as revenue for your digital music distribution is that you can offer your music for free, which gives it maximum exposure and will get it downloaded as much as possible.

There is no easier way to spread and promote your music online than to offer it for free, but if you are also looking to make money from it, you need something else in place to produce profit. Online advertising can potentially accomplish this, but there are some problems with this strategy.

If you were considering using click through text ads like Google Adsense, the main issue would be that there wouldn’t be any reason for people to click the ads, which is how you make money. If they are at your website to download your music for free an ad would really have to catch their eye for them to click on it instead of downloading your music. So that method of advertising would not produce many clicks and not make you much money.

If you set up some kind of advertising program that payed you based on number of views you would need to have consistent sizable traffic in order to make decent money. There probably wont be that many people coming to your site to download your music everyday. You might get a lot of hits all at once or a steady stream of a few people everyday but your free digital music alone will not produce enough views for advertising money. Unless you already have a large following online, hits based advertising will not make you much money for your digital music distribution.

Although this makes it hard to view advertising as a good method for making money with online music distribution, there are some solutions. Having a blog or other content on the site that is distributing your music can get the kind of consistent traffic that would make view based and click through advertising work. This would also bring more people to your site to download your music and help you promote your music online, but only if you start getting pages ranked on Google (more on that later).

With a little creativity you can use advertising to make money even while giving away your music online for free. This will spread your music quickly and hopefully give you some decent profits, but the key is to build consistent traffic through content other than your free music downloads. Anyway, its an idea that could work well in some cases.