Music on Line

by the Tech Head

With the proliferation of places on line where songwriters can showcase their music, there is no excuse to keep your songs to yourself. Get out there and share! That's what music is all about, sharing with others. Of course, it is always nice when you can money doing what you love to do, writing and playing music, but you must take the first step and get your music out to the people. Today we will look at some of the places you can place your music so that people can listen to it, download it for free, or even pay you for it.

One of the first music sites to appear way back in 1993 when the internet was in its infancy, was the "Internet Underground Music Archive," IUMA for short. Their main mission was and still is the support of indie artists and the service is free. You get a free home page where you can upload vital information about your band, your music and your pictures. You can find IUMA at www.iuma.com.

Vitaminic is the main European site for indie music. They are also free to join and their service is just about the same as IUMA. As a matter of fact, Vitamicic now owns IUMA. You get your own free web page and you can upload your music same as IUMA. One difference is that in Vitaminic you are required to provide at least one song that Vitaminic customers can download for free. Go to www.vitaminic.com to set up your web page.

Mp3.com is the world's premier on line music destination. With an archive of over 1,000,000 songs they are by far the largest source of indie music on the web. With mp3.com you can also get a free page where you can showcase your music and or for $19.95 a month you can become a
premium artist and be provided with extra services, such as p4p (pay for play) where you can actually get paid very time people play your music. We will address the ins and outs of mp3.com at a future date. If you are an indie musician you "must" have a presence on this web site. Go to www.mp3.com to sign up.

Another important free site is found at www.songramp.com There you can also get a free web page and you can upload your music. One interesting feature of this site is the open mike, where you can post your songs and people can vote on them and that way you move up the charts. This is by far the smallest of the sites with about 1,300 members, but they do try hard and do provide excellent service for the songwriter.

Other sites where you can post your music are www.besonic.com and www.ampcast.com. These are not free but for about $75 a year each you can post your music to a wide audience. Besonic is another European site such as Vitaminic and Ampcast allows you to post fairly high resolution mp3 files. Check them out.

These are but a few of the places you can showcase your music on line. Next month we'll examine virtual online record stores where your music can be sold.

The Tech Head lives only on line. You can find him at www.lordtiger.com/techhead