Selling Music Online

Justin.tv is a popular and relatively new online site where people can broadcast (or ‘lifecast’) themselves or whatever they want through webcams. As soon as I discovered this site I knew it could be used by musicians, in a similar way to YouTube, to promote their music online and in effect help them sell their music. A few people on the site already use their channels to promote their music but with some creativity they could take it even further.

Most of the musicians on the site and anyone else using the channels to promote outside websites just leave their link in the description area and hope people watching the channel will click on it. This is the obvious and simple way of using JustinTV for promotional purposes but I think this can be improved upon, especially for musicians.

If you have a band or do a solo act, a good idea might be to have regular and scheduled performances broadcasted live through the site. A live musical performance will generally have good viewership on the site because most of your competition will be live video of random people sitting at their computer typing. So it is easy to make it near the top of the charts at JustinTV, which will get you a decent amount of viewers. Putting a link in the channel description area back to your bands website or somewhere your music is being sold online will get you some traffic from anyone who is interested in the performance they are seeing. Also giving a shout out to the link in between songs will increase that traffic.

By putting on regular concerts you will have a place current fans of your music can see you performing online and also you will build up a regular base of JustinTV fans of your channel. This can be turned into consistent traffic to other sites that promote or sell your music online.

Another thing to keep in mind is that you can have your channel broadcasting even when you are not performing. Doing the lifecasting thing can still get you some regular viewers, and if your channel is always running you can be getting a small amount of traffic throughout the day. It helps if there is something going on in your channel, and crazy antics will always get your further to the top of the charts, so broadcasting anything can increase the promotion of your music online.

JustinTV is still pretty new and there aren’t that many musicians on there promoting their music yet. I have outlined a basic idea for online music promotion on JustinTV but Im sure it could be developed further and used to really help musicians market their music on the internet. Webcams are not expensive and the site is free to use as of now so anyone can get set up for it. If you don’t mind lifecasting a little JustinTV can creatively be used to promote you or your bands music online for free, so check out the site and see what you can come up with.