How Your Band Can Make Serious Money Online

Musicians have NEVER had the amount of freedom and advantages of being an independent artist as they do today.  In earlier ages, the record companies were everything.  Don't underestimate them in today's world though, they still have 1,000 times more contacts and resources than the independent musician will ever have, but my point is that independent musicians have never been able to strive in the past as well as they can today.  Let me explain.

What is the most popular form of music purchasing in today's world?  Most will say the internet of course.

Before the internet, you had to buy CD's from retail stores.  Of course the independent musician could sell their own CDs after shows, but that isn't much compared to having your CD in every retail store throughout the country.  In this obsolete situation, only the artists with record label support could get their CD on the store shelves.  Why would a store waste shelf space by putting an unknown album on their shelves when they can put other CDs that are guaranteed to sell thousands of copies? 

They wouldn't.  So in this obsolete situation, you would be out of luck.  BUT, since major distributors have become the main sources of music purchasing, you are in great luck.  When CD sales relied on selling hard copies off store shelves, guess how much that costs?  The materials, packaging, etc can cost up to hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars depending upon the quantity. For this financial outlay, there is NO guarantee that you will end up in the black.  Guess how much it costs to sell that same album in digital form via a major distributor?  Nearly nothing.  No material costs, no packaging costs. This sounds like the ideal place to distribute your music digitally Why? because major distributors are all attempting to monopolize digital distribution. Show a fan an album of yours with a fancy wee logo and they're likely to jump on it purely for that reason.

This has to stop. Not only do you have to pay an initial fee but  an annually recurring fee to keep your material there. Most major distributors give the artist NO control of the pricing of an album. Case in point: I have an album, "Catharsis" with a major distributor. It's priced it at $16.99!!! Admittedly it's a 15-track album but I am in the midst of making it much cheaper for you whilst maintaining the same sound-file format...and more! Who's going to buy a $16.99 album from a barely know artist such as myself when the likes of The Rolling Stones, etc. are priced lower?

I have discovered a site called Bandcamp which allows independent artists to upload their music in more file formats than the major distributors. The upload and download process is very fast. For fans, they can download the file format of their choice. If you check out the Bandcamp player to your left, you can play the album "Mean Business" in its' entirety....as often as you like. Additionally, artists can offer discount codes. The discount code for "Mean Business" is: thistle  Feel free to enter the codeword at checkout to observe the hefty discount. You are under no obligation to proceed at this point. It is this flexibility and transparency that appeals to this independent musician.

Theoretically, all you have to do is make ONE copy of the song and that ONE copy can generate MILLIONS of sales, where as in the obsolete music business it would take MILLIONS of copies to make MILLIONS of sales.  See what I mean?  You can have an equal amount of product on the "digital shelves" as any famous singer in the world - that eliminates your dependance on a record label to fund the massive production costs of putting an album in every store across the nation.

For the first time ever, independent artists are able to put their music up for download/sale on the digital shelves of iTunes just like all of the major artists with massive record deals. You, and anybody else in the world with access to the internet, can now put your very own music up for sale just like any other independent musician. You get the money for all of the sales, where as a record label would have taken 80-90% of the profits from you.

Its your music, and you should get paid for it - ALL of it, not just a small fraction. Of course getting a record deal will significantly boost your career, but it is no longer true that you can only achieve success with a record label. The tables have turned, the doors have opened, and ANYBODY can walk through them.

Custom Search