It works like every other Wordpress plugin, but there are many options and settings that may take some time to figure out. It can also be a little time consuming to modify some of the options and maybe even some code to make the plugin fit your Wordpress site, but once you have it set up it offers a completely automated way of selling digital music and being payed through PayPal.

This is the ideal situation for independent musicians. If you are selling your music digitally over the internet with an automated system you have a product that has zero cost, unlimited supply, and requires no work from you to sell (besides promoting it of course). That means its almost all profit for every unit you sell. Not a bad business model.

If you sell only full albums, this will keep the fees that PayPal collects to a minimum. You will be taking in everything minus 33 cents or whatever their fee is as profit. Although this is an awesome setup, you still need people to come and buy your music. It all comes down to promotion on the internet, that has to happen before you can sell anything.

To see what you can do with this Wordpress digital download selling plugin here is my site that I set up for my music: Michael Farkas. Just go to the digital album downloads section. I set it up in a special way so that you see the album covers and click on them to go to the digital store. This can be a great way for independent musicians to sell music online and keep the profits for themselves.

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.

Promoting and selling music online is one of the most important concepts for independent musicians to learn and develop. The internet and online world offers the cheapest and largest distribution media possible, and it is one that grows by the day with no sign of slowing down. Making music has become easier for individual musicians but making a great album is not enough, you have to know how to promote it online. Promotion leads to sales and greater live show attendance so it is really the driving force behind success for musicians and their music.

The good thing about promoting and selling music online is that musicians and bands can do it relatively cheaply, if not for free. This site will show you how to promote and sell your music in these low cost ways, but they do take some time and effort. Understanding how the internet works and knowing what to use can put your music ahead of other musicians, even if they make better music. Promoting and selling music online can become as profitable as you want it, if you spend the time you learn some internet tricks and put in a consistent effort. So thus, how to promote and sell music online has been made.

If you are going to give your music away for free online, you need to make it work for you. Just letting people have it will spread the word a bit and maybe gain you some more fans but you need to do more. Making people at least register their name and email address on your site before downloading the free music can be a great way to build up a fan mailing list. This is a techniques used to much benefit by some of the most popular pop groups today. For them it can really increase their album and live show sales. Imagine giving away some free music and getting thousands of email addresses of fans that can be used for announcements for shows and albums that will make money.

Even for a less high profile local musician, getting a mailing list like this from offering free music downloads online can increase your attendance at live shows and really help build a fan base.

When you give away music online for free with the hope of eventually making money you obviously have to get people to buy something at some point. If you are not a touring musician trying to spread the word online with free music downloads you have to sell your music online to profit. In this case, giving away a free EP or demo with a couple songs is the best thing to do. This will spread your music to people who don’t know your work well enough to pay for it yet, and provide all the online music promotion free downloads produce. Then once your free music has built up some fans and exposure you offer a full album on your site for a normal price. If people liked the free music they came across they will look for more, and if they liked it enough they will buy more when they see that its the only way. Even just releasing a free single to go with a priced album can be a good promotional technique.

Giving away music online for free is a great cheap (for everyone) method for online music promotion. If you have good music to release you can easily get people to download it for free, and sometimes this can lead to a lot of new fans. Don’t just release some filler for free though, if thats all some people will hear it wont make the best impression. Always consider some kind of free music giveaway when trying to sell and promote music online.

Yes, bands like Radiohead have done well with this method of selling music online, but they are a special case. They already had millions of devoted fans (including me) waiting for them to release another album. And when they released it in this relatively unique fashion, it created a huge internet buzz that promoted their music even further. It made everyone talk about online music distribution and whats wrong with the industry and all that. So Radiohead ended up letting people choose what to pay for their album and got tons of their fans to throw them a few dollars. They didn’t have to go through all the normal music promotion stuff regular record label bands do, they created their own promotion online.

Radiohead made it work (and then released a physical copy of the album, along with a special discbox thing, equaling lots of money) but this doesn’t mean your average unknown band or musician can make money online selling their music like this. In fact, you should probably just forget about this method. Even other  popular bands have had trouble with this kind of online music distribution. For someone without millions of fans, its not going to make you money.

I tried this idea out for a while, and after 100 downloads of one of my albums not a single person had donated anything. I know that may be a small sample size but its enough to see how ineffective donation based music downloads are for making money online. While it failed to make me even a cent, it makes sense (get it?) why it did not.

People don’t want to take the time to enter in their credit card info or fill out anything if they don’t have to. Thats enough to keep probably 95% of them from paying anything right there. If it was as simple as pulling some change out of their pocket and giving it to a musician they might, but bringing their credit card into the equation is not going to happen. This is the main problem with donation based downloads.

There is also the obvious problem that people are not generous, especially when it comes to purchasing music. Most people are not going to pay for something if you give them the option of not paying for it, and I cant blame them.

There are a few ways you can improve the chances of donation based downloads for selling music online. Don’t just stick a PayPal button near the downloading button, make them go through PayPal and enter $0 if they want it for free. Actually, I dont think PayPal lets you enter $0, which brings up an interesting idea.

Try making them pay at least one cent for your music. If they have to get out their credit card or log into their PayPal account anyway, they will probably pay you more than that one cent. This sounds like a pretty good idea actually, I might try it.

In general, donation based music downloads do not make a lot of money, if any at all. So don’t rely on people to donate money for your music if you really need the money, because they wont. But if you find some variation of the idea behind donating for music or choosing the price, you may be able to get something to work.

What CDBaby offers is to set up a page on their site where your CD can be bought. For physical albums, people will be able to order them by credit card and CDBaby will handle the ordering and shipping process and then alert you that an album has been sold. They keep $4 for every album sale and pay you the rest every Monday night. To help your album be sold CDBaby will promote your music online through their own website which receives a lot of traffic everyday.

This all sounds great so far, but CDBaby doesnt just do all of this for $4 from every album sale. There is a $35 one time charge to set up your CD on their site so it is ready to be sold online. This is a fair price for everything that they do, but one of the things that might keep you from using CDBaby for physical album sales is that you have to provide all of the CDs. You have to mail them the CDs to sell every month and they need to look decent too.

This sounds like a pain to me, and is the main reason I will probably never use CDBaby for physical album selling online. But I never really wanted to sell physical CDs anyway. If you arn’t willing to do this, you can still consider CDBaby for selling your music online digitally.

For the same $35 set up charge you can get your album on CDBaby digitally. In addition to having your music on the CDBaby site promotional directories they also submit your album to iTunes, Napster, Rhapsody, and more digital music selling sites. They keep 9% of all digital sales of your music but that is a small price to pay for the amount of exposure they give your album. This part of CDBaby sounds really good, having your music available on all of those high profile sites will really be nice for any independent musician.

CDBaby can be a great option for independent artists looking to sell and promote their music online. They charge a decent price for their services but do enough work for you to make it worthwhile. Many musicians have sold a lot of albums on CDBaby so it can obviously work. They do not get the rights to your music and you can cancel at any time. If you are an independent musician looking for a method of selling your music online, I would seriously consider what CDBaby offers.

The first and probably best way is to get some advertising on your channel. I’m not sure exactly of the specifics of doing this but Ive seen other do it. Some people have small ads in their profile and I’m sure they get some money for having them there. If you have a channel with constant and regular traffic you should be able to come across some company willing to advertise in your profile.

Another way would be to sign up for some kind of affiliate program online, maybe a music related one, and put your affiliate link in the channel profile. If you have people coming to watch you perform music live on the internet they might be interested in musical equipment, and they might click on your link and buy something. With a good amount of viewers everyday you could make a decent sale every once in a while.

Finally, one of the more common ways of making money with JustinTv is to set up a ChipIn donation box. These are donation buttons like the PayPal ones but they give a goal amount to be reached and some small explanation about what the money is for. One person made enough money to get an iphone from donations, and she said thats what it was for.

In general, acting crazy, being attractive, or being weird will get you more views on JustinTv, but having live musical performances can get decent traffic as well. This can be turned into promotion for your music site so you can sell more music online, or you can use some of these methods to make some money directly from JustinTv. None of these methods will make you rich, but they can produce some nice cash on the side or just some good exposure for your music.

He makes a hip hop influenced style of electronic beats with improvised keyboard soloing over top. Most of his music is pretty good, and his keyboard skills are impressive, but there are a ton of people who can play keyboard or piano really well and make great music. Jenkees has gained a huge following becuase he is better than all of them at promoting his music online(whether he does it consciously or not).

You see, he is an eccentric guy. Watch one of his videos on YouTube and you’ll see. He has an odd appearence and way of speaking, and this is why he has become so popular. Obviously he is talented and makes music that people like, and if he didn’t this wouldn’t be happening, but he is so popular now becuase he is different. His YouTube videos all have huge debates going on in the comments section, mainly because some people think he is weird and want to diminish his music. Then there are all the people defending him. This all goes back and forth to create a lot of views and exposure for the videos. In general, his unique and memorable personality spreads his music much further than it ever could have gotten.

Again though, his music still has to be good to get this kind of success. The huge amount of views his YouTube videos get allow him to easily promote his music for sale. He has a website that he links to in every video that has downloads and physical albums available for normal CD and mp3 prices. He is probably using some kind of mp3 selling through PayPal service to set all of this up, which do cost money but Im sure hes still taking down big profits. Now he is getting his videos on the front page of YouTube and writing tracks for popular podcasts, all of which will promote his music even further and increase his sales.

Ronald Jenkees is an ideal example of how to promote music online with YouTube and make money online as an independent musician. He proves that it is possible. But don’t think that you will have the same kind of success so easily. He didn’t set out to make money from his music, it happened because of his quirky personality in his videos with considerable talent to back it up. It does show a basic model for online music promotion and selling music independently through a personal website, and how powerful YouTube can be for musicians.

One way musicians can use Craigslist is to sell instruments and equipment to people who live near you. You should always deal locally with people on Craigslist, thats kind of the whole point. When you do this stuff in person, you’re probably not going to get ripped off with faulty equipment like you could possibly with eBay. Ive both bought and sold instruments and musical equipment on Craigslist and its always gone well. It can be better than eBay because you don’t have to ship or mail anything. This also helps keep the prices down. If you’re a musician looking for instruments online, make sure to check out Craigslist.

Another way musicians can use the site is to find players for your band or people to jam with in the ‘musicians’ section. This can be a great way to break into the local music scene in your area. You also might be able to find gigs in there and other services for musicians.

The lessons section of Craigslist is one of the best ways to get students as a private music teacher, or to find teachers as a student. It is exclusively what I depend on to get private guitar students. Everytime I have made a post there advertising my guitar teaching services I have gotten at least three students to start taking lessons. Private instrument teachers looking to independently build up clients should try out Craiglist before anything else.

In general, when using Craigslist you should make detailed and specific posts explaining exactly what you are looking for or offering. Always use pictures when selling musical equipment. I don’t look at equipment posts without pictures, and I expect other people wont as well. Being specific will ensure that you only get responses from people who are serious about what you are offering and interested in exactly what you have posted. All musicians should take advantage of Craigslist, the traffic that all of their city sites get can be used to help you promote your musical endeavors. It is one of the best ways online for musicians to make more money in real life.

There are a ton of websites offering a music file or mp3 selling system complete with file previews, all completely automated, but they all cost money. I don’t want to pay anyone any money to sell my music. This is the goal: to be able to sell my music online without any overhead. If musicians can achieve that then we can all profit from our music.

I’m not saying musicians cant sell their music online and make a profit with the current systems, they can. But we shouldn’t have to pay any money. There has to be a way to sell our music from our own sites without paying anyone. This could be the future of selling music, on the internet or otherwise; all musicians selling their own music online from their own sites, and keeping 100% of the profits that they deserve.

Paypal has some services that come close to what I want. Ive tried a few things out and I can make an automated system for buying a file download, but the problem is that there are a few pretty easy ways around it to get the files for free. In order to block that, I have to lose the complete automation of the process. There are sites that host your music and sell it, even license your music with creative commons, but they take a cut of the sales of course.

The search for a completely automated and free way of selling music online continues.