Selling your own music

most distributors and label don’t pay as they should

so why not sell by yourself

if your interested have a look at my blog

https://satanicalbotsritual.wordpress.com/2017/03/23/selling-your-own-music/

I don’t sell music, but I do buy music.

From my perspective, the main advantages of (good) labels is that they promote and advertise the music, and that they filter it. The latter is a mixed bag, but it’s much like with self-published books vs. books put out by publishing houses: the quality to junk ratio is usually much better with professional labels or publishers. For the customer this is a plus, at least in general. I buy more self-published music than I do self-published books, because I can preview the product better with music, but I usually first look at professionally released/published music when I explore and seek for a to me new artist.

the best thing in the world for musicians right now is bandcamp, and as it continues to gain more and more clout and respect, things will only get better. artists make far more off sales via bandcamp than any other service, be it download based like iTunes or streaming like Spotify / Apple Music.

most distributors and label don’t pay as they should

so why not sell by yourself

if your interested have a look at my blog

https://satanicalbotsritual.wordpress.com/2017/03/23/selling-your-own-music/

I agree but I have one question.

How do you generate a fanbase?

A label might be helpful in that way.

Heres an interesting video which may be good to reference in the article

https://www.f9-audio.com/blogs/tutorials/36418561-music-industry-101-the-money-pt-1

I agree but I have one question.

How do you generate a fanbase?

A label might be helpful in that way.

The best way to generate a fanbase, besides simply making great music, is to know who your audience is, and then target them.

A label might be helpful for such things, yes, but getting a good deal with a good label might be just as hard / harder than finding a fanbase for your music… and many labels might not want to sign a band that doesn’t already have a notable fanbase anyway.

So, know your target audience. Then get your music in front of them. Forums, facebook groups, other social media groups / channels – get your music in there so the people who are mostly likely to enjoy it will be likely to encounter it. Hopefully the rest takes care of itself and spreads on its own, but that’ll never happen without some targeting work first.

my 2 cents!

-M

I agree but I have one question.

How do you generate a fanbase?

A label might be helpful in that way.

+1 for target audience.

In fact you can go one step further with target audience and trick people into liking things they don’t actually like if you can target the influencers. Red Bull used this technique years ago to get their product off the ground. What they did was send a load of representatives around to colleges, and tried to find people who were the most trendy, keeping up with the cool and hip, kind of individuals, and then spun them this story that Red Bull was the latest, greatest soft drink that was taking off. [Even though it tasted like arse. Which Red Bull knew because they were told so from product testing] So these people went away anyway, and in their need to be trendy and ‘with it’ took the Red Bull samples off with them to show all their friends about this cool new product they were drinking so they could impress their mates. And so there was this kind of domino effect where all these college kids who wanted to be in the loop all started drinking Red Bull cause it was the new trend. Couple months later Red Bull was everywhere, everyone was drinking it. And also by that stage people had figured out they could use it as a mixer with alcohol to get a good buzz.

End result: a mediocre product at best with a bad taste which could be sold at premium price to people who don’t really even like it, all because of the influence of a few popular individuals opinions.

The same goes for music. I mean Pop Music isn’t even a genre, it’s just a classification for what’s popular the very same as Red Bull.

That being said I don’t know what your music is like, I’m sure it’s excellent, I just used Red Bull’s mediocrity as an example of clever marketing and psychological trickery.

I heard someone say that producers and musicians shouldnt be afraid to give their first few albums away for free on youtube (even if they had to pay for mastering), with some good artwork or an interesting music video and the right kind of category tags, in order to get some degree of notoriety online…getting their views up before they try to charge for music on their own website or bandcamp…like, luring them in with youtube and free tracks to download, then trying to get payment on the third album.

But then I heard someone else say that if you do it that way, anyone can sample your tunes, loop it up and sell it as their own…or incorporate your tune into a DJ set and get paid for the set while the producer gets nothing, not even getting their name known.

As for the category tags on youtube, some people put the name of the software they used, the genre of music, the name of other artists they sound like…but some people just go straight for popular searches even if it has nothing to do with their music…like I saw one guy on youtube who had tagged his tune with ‘chocolate’, ‘pizza’…

Because at they end of the day, who even wants a physical copy of anything these days…maybe there is more money to be made in selling your logo on T-shirts after a live show or something…

Another way is to try to sell your beats to MC’s or singers.