Music on the internet

• Offering your on the internet for free • Offering music on payment on the internet • Copyright • More information

Offering your music on the internet for free

Even without a record company there are several ways to distribute your music on the internet

Free downloads There are various publicity-related reasons to offer your music for free: • it can be part of a promotional campaign, for instance as a foretaste of a new to be released; • halls and music cafes have easier access to your music, which might result in more bookings. • Your band can become more widely known to a larger audience

Streaming If you don’t want to give away your music for free, but you do want people to listen to it free of charge, you can choose to offer entire songs or parts of a song (snippets) as a stream. This means that your music is played directly and is not downloaded first. A safe way of letting your music be heard, getting people’s attention and stimulating them to buy it.

There are many websites and programmes you can use to offer your music to others for free. These sites often offer an ‘embedding’ option that allows you to place the music on your own website without having to pay for it. Of course you can put music on your own site, but this demands band width and thus costs money. In addition, the examples below provide you with statistics about how often your songs are listened to, and who is listening to your songs etcetera.

On the following websites you can easily place your music.

Bandcamp On this site you can create your own profile. You choose whether to offer your music for free or for money. Your fans could decide how much they want to pay for your songs, but you can also set fixed prices. Creating your own page is for free, but takes 15% of your sales. You can always check the statistics of who is watching, listening and linking your page and you can design your own look and sell merchandise.

Soundcloud Soundcloud is similar to Bandcamp. The biggest difference and advantage is that Souncloud is a social network, so you can follow people and be followed by other people.

YouTube YouTube is very important because it is the biggest search engine for music. Even if you don’t have a video clip you can still place your music on YouTube together with a great photograph of your band for example. It is easy to make an account yourself and to upload videos. The best-known discovery to date on YouTube is Esmee Denters from Holland, who sang covers from her bedroom and was eventually signed up by Justin Timberlake’s label and became the first Dutchwoman to appear on Oprah Winfrey’s show.

Facebook is the most popular social network in the world with over one billion users in 2012. It is not possible to upload music to Facebook directly but you can use widgets from TouTube, Bandcamp and SoundCloud to promote your music on Facebook. Facebook is

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the most widely used and most successful site to promote performances , concerts and CD releases. You can create a page for yourself as an artist or band so your fans can follow you and stay informed.

Sellaband Sellaband gives you the opportunity to make a profile and put your music on its website as streaming audio. Visitors to the website can download the music free of charge. They can also buy 10-dollar shares in artists – you, for example. If 50,000 dollars worth of shares (called Parts) are bought, a team including an A&R (Artists & Repertoire) person and a first- class producer is formed whom you can record an album with. The revenue is divided between the artist, Sellaband and the Part holders.The site went bankrupt in 2010 but made a restart.

MySpace MySpace was one of the first profile sites for amateur bands as well as famous artists. Due to better alternatives like Bandcamp and Soundcloud, it went downhill with MySpace . After a major makeover the site has been adapted to the needs of the present time, but most musicians have already chosen alternatives.

Downloading and illegal downloading The most popular way to get illegal music is via the so-called Torrents: a peer-to-peer system (between computers of users) to exchange data. A central location co-ordinates the downloads but doesn’t actually offer data itself. Both downloading and uploading are forbidden. In The it is Stichting Brein that fights illegal downloading.

The rise of music offered on the internet years ago thoroughly embarrassed record companies. With the exception of a few, nobody was prepared for the enormous impact of this medium. Music is still put on the internet illegally, enabling computer users all over the world to download for free. Illegal downloading causes labels and artists to miss out on a lot of money.

On the other hand, many artists have benefitted from offering their music for free via torrent sites. The promotional value of making your music public should not be underestimated . The loss of income for downloading is the other side of it, but you might wonder whether the music otherwise was heard.

Offering paid music on the internet If you don’t want to offer your music for free on the internet, you can also let people download it on payment. There are various payment systems with which you can put paid downloads on your own site. With a small detour you can, through sales by third parties such as CD Baby, get your own songs on the popular iTunes or . See www.spotifyartists.com/guides/#get-your-music-on-spotify to see how this works.

Payment systems

Paypal There is a number of different payment systems, of which Paypal is one of the best known. This payment company is used worldwide. Only people with a Paypal account (a kind of bank account) can pay this way. When someone downloads one of your songs through Paypal, this is automatically transferred to your account.

Advantages of Paypal: • Can be ordered for free (you do have to deposit a minimum amount); • The amount is transferred immediately; • It is possible to do transactions from each country; • Your financial data are secured and are not shared with third parties.

Disadvantages of Paypal:

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• You pay receipt costs, a small percentage of the amount to be received; • You have to have some knowledge of the internet to install yourself on the site.

Legal downloading The iTunes Musicstore of computer manufacturer Apple is the most well-known online music store. There you can for instance download a song for € 0.99 or an album for approximately €10,-. In a ‘regular’ store, an album usually costs €19,-. Apple closes deals with many record companies and bigger artists for sales in the webshop. Nowadays its possess 70% of the legal download market.

Newer developments are the apps and website that stream songs and for free or little, for example Spotify, Deezer and Napster. The musicians earn per stream or download, but the record companies earn more than the artists.

Selling music through third parties You can also sell your CD (tangibly) on the internet. An example of a good site for this purpose is the American CD Baby. This company restricts its activities strictly to the sales of the ‘tangible’ product. Besides that, CD Baby links you through to several online stores that – by contrast - specialize in download sales. Through this detour, you can, as an independent artist, find yourself among all of the big names, selling your work for instance in iTunes and Spotify.

Offering your CD on the internet yourself The simplest way, and maybe among beginning musicians the most common way to sell your music on the internet, is offering the tangible CD. You state a price on your site, a bank account and a name. Ask the buyer to place an order through e-mail or an order form. You send the CD as soon as the money has arrived. This has nothing to do with downloading, or putting music on the internet. In this way you can however link the possibilities of streaming to sales in a simple manner.

Copyright

On February 4, 2014 the European Parliament approved new legislation that songwriters and musicians in the European Union in the future more quickly receive a fee for publication of their work on the Internet. Artists should get their royalties paid no later than nine months after the end of the year when the products are put online. Thus, the copyrights of artists through online platforms are better protected. The new rules also make it easier for providers of online music services like Spotify. They will no longer need to ask separate licenses for copyright in every EU-country (like Buma Stemra in the Netherlands).

Creative Common Licences In order to keep some control over what happens to your songs, you can make use of Creative Common licenses. These are licences with which you indicate by contract what the downloader is allowed to do with your music. With the use of these licences, your music is free, but you keep the copyright. There are various licences, for example for sampling and public property. More information of this subject can be found on the site of Creative Commons the Netherlands. Make sure the licence you wish to use is valid in the Netherlands!

More information • Various ICT-texts on BeroepKunstenaar.nl, such as making music with the computer • Article about copyright in music (pdf) • Article about copyright on the internet (pdf) on BeroepKunstenaar.nl

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