David Nevue on selling your music online:

How you go about marketing your music successfully depends on a great many factors. This article contains some suggestions where to start.

I recommend musicians take a three-pronged approach to selling their music on the Internet. The first 'prong' is what I call 'targeting with buzz.' That is, you create a buzz about your music and get people talking about it. To do that, however, you need to promote your music where people are already searching for new music to try out. That is, instead of trying to bring people to you (or your web site), you go to where the people are already hanging out. Go where the action is, so to speak. So, where's that?

The first place I recommend any musician start promoting their music is MP3.com. Though some independent musicians feel MP3.com has 'sold out' (actually, they literally have) to the commercial record industry, the fact is that for pure exposure it's the place to be. MP3.com is a huge magnet for music-loving traffic. Perform a search at Google for 'music' and MP3.com the #2 site listed. Search for 'mp3' and it's the #1 site. You just can't find a better place to put your music right in the path of cyber-traffic. With proper promotion, you'll have hundreds, even thousands of new people listening to your music every day. For example, for January 2002, I was able to generate over 50,000 plays of my songs. And that was with just basic, simple, inexpensive promotion. That exposure resulted in more CD sales, lots of email from new fans, and more importantly, name recognition. Once you've mastered MP3.com, you can start setting up shop at other, similar sites such as Vitaminic.com, GarageBand.com, CDStreet.com, Ampcast.com, JavaMusic.com and others.

The second 'prong' to increasing CD sales on the net is what I call 'targeting by site.' With this option, your objective is to create a web site that targets the people most likely to be interested in your music. The question to ask yourself is, 'what are the people who are most likely to buy your music already searching the Internet for?' Once you have that answer, design a web site to target that specific audience. Then, promote your web site using tried and true web site marketing techniques (see spider-food.net for search engine promotion tips). In this scenario, you don't focus on promoting your music per se, you focus on promoting the web site. Then, since your web site is attracting visitors that tend to enjoy your style of music, you advertise your music on your specialized web site, marketing directly to those targeted visitors.

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