I finally decided recently that some presence and some progress is better than none at all, so I’m going to do everything that I possibly can with free/cheap services on the Internet. Bandcamp for music, Posterous for my blog, which will also serve as my main hub. My ultimate goal is to see if I can integrate all of these services together in a reasonably coherent way.

I guess my point is that it’s possible to just use what’s available to have a solid on-line presence. 80% of something must be better than 100% of nothing, after all.

Time is a currency, gratitude is a currency, the exchange of music for someone talking about what you do to the people they come into contact with on the web is a FAR better deal than any normal scatter-shot advertising. Experimentation is the key.

My best advice here is to be the kind of internet audience that you yourself would want – that’s what I live by

Thanks again for the continued input. Is it Hendrix that’s always quoted as saying ‘it’s not a crime to be heard’ or something like that? I forget.

Chris – you’re right of course. The principles are the same as they’ve always been I think; for reasons we cannot always articulate, we have a compulsion to connect or entertain or document or what have you. I’m just really conscious that these days there is so much out there that I/we/you don’t want to be just an addition to the background noise. Know what I mean? I guess it comes down to a perception of the integrity of the person doing it.

The whole Myspace thing gets me too. I’ve never asked for someone to come ‘check me out’ as it just doesn’t feel right. I don’t know. It’s a learning curve and I think in the end if my intentions are pure (!) then it’ll be ok.

Regarding the ‘pay what you want’ thing, as discussed, you could be pleasantly surprised. Though I’m on iTunes at the mo, I’ve bugged poor Steve for advice (see above!) about alternative avenues as it seems to be working for him. For me I know the initial reticence was the idea that ‘someone else can decide that my stuff has no value’ vs. the ‘I can decide to give this away for free’ thing. It’s a perception of control for me (all an illusion of course but then as a singer and a guitarist……could it get any worse? heh, heh, heh!)

Steve / Chris – I just don’t know how you can keep on top of all that stuff, hat off to you. Do you concern yourself with (don’t laugh) ‘brand consistency’ or any of those things about your online presence?
At the mo, I’m looking into my own website and some of the quoted costs are quite high, especially when you get into e-com and all that jazz. I know this is a ‘how long is a piece of string’ question but is it just easier and cheaper to use aggregators to put your stuff up rather than having your own download shop (well, either for free or paid stuff)?
I read somewhere that the best way to utilise all the online places is to drive traffic to your own site (sounds perfectly logical) but I’m a bit in the dark about the feasibility (both technical & financial) of providing a platform for people to download stuff directly from me. Does that make any sense?!
I’ll leave it there as Sainsbury’s is calling and you both no doubt have better things to do than listen to me prattle Thanks once again both for your thoughts and advice. Happy snow covered Sunday!

sorry, I wasn’t very clear in my last response – it’s not that people will ‘integrity’ will always pay (it certainly wouldn’t demonstrate a lack of integrity to accept the offer of free music!), but that people who saw their relationship as one where they weren’t planning on paying for music at all aren’t going to change that just because you charge for it – they’ll just go elsewhere, and as you so succinctly point out, you’re better off having listeners than non-listeners. So we can make it available to people, let those who want to pay for it and give people room to surprise us with their generosity.

Good thoughts, thanks

I disagree that only people with integrity buy music. Some people don’t have much money and its better that they can have my music than not. Some people consume a huge amount of music and could never pay for it all and I’d simply rather people can hear my music than not.

It is interesting, however, that some people are paying more than the rate on iTunes. I’m going to experiment with the pay what you want idea next year. Do you have any stats on how many people are downloading your music for free? How does it compare to paid downloads %-wise?

Hmmm. The more I think it through the more I’m moving towards liking the pay what you want but there is still part of me that doesn’t like it.

@inkysmudge

You have to have confidence that the music you are making is good and you’re doing the right thing but…..randomly contacting someone out of the blue to say the might like your music just doesn’t seem right. If you’re asked about your music that’s the time to tell them what you do and why they should check you out.

It bugs me on MySpace mainly because it’s normally bands that have nothing to do with the style of music and we’re a band too. I know bands are there to network with fans and other bands but marketing yourself to totally unrelated bands is the wrong way to go about things. Also if every band did this as a way to get new fans I’d probably cut my ears off and stop listening to music.

Obviously you want people to hear your music so just make sure its really damn good and is in the places that people hear music (last.fm, Spotify etc.). Play live and impress people so they tell their friends.

I try to keep a ‘broad yet manageable portfolio’ of solo media/music presences. There aren’t many sites or services that I avoid on principle, but there are quite a few I’ve never bothered with because they didn’t seem to provide much of a return for the investment of setting up there.

Having said that, sometimes investing time into an underused platform can reap dividends because no-one else is working it. So if you discover something new, it’s usually worth signing up if it’s free.

For sales/streaming, my music is on about 60 different sites, thanks to CDBaby’s digital distribution scheme. about 55 of those have never paid me a penny, because I haven’t sold anything there. The ones that I do get sales from are iTunes, Amazon, eMusic, Napster, Rhapsody… I’ve been meaning to sort out 7Digital and We7, but not got round to it yet.

Bandcamp is my favourite because of the control I have over what happens to my music, how attractive the widgets are, the ease of payment and reporting, and the quality of the files. I love it.

But you’re right, you need to be where people’s ears are. That’s why I’m happy to be on Spotify despite not having a solid answer to the question of how much I’ll get paid. I’ll get *something* but the difference between the top and bottom estimates, for the volume of listens I tend to get on such services, is negligible. The ears are more valuable to me than the revenue.