Selling Music Online

I talked about promoting music online with YouTube a few days ago and I recently came across a perfect example of how to really do this effectively. My friend sent me a message randomly about some musician that I should check out, and it was a YouTube video of the guy. His name is Ronald Jenkees, and he has turned his YouTube videos into a huge amount of exposure for an independent musician. Now he is selling his music off of his own site and probably making some serious money.

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.