Selling Music Online

Giving away music online for free can be a good way to promote your music online. It can actually indirectly make musicians money if it is used as an online promotional tool. No matter what kind of musician or band you are, giving away your music for free on the internet will spread it as fast as possible. There is really no reason for people not to download it if it is free, unless its just bad.

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.