One of the biggest questions for musicians is how should they release their music? This is especially true in the digital age of the Internet. While there are online music stores where you can sell your music in physical or digital format to your fans, music streaming sites are now gaining considerable popularity as well.
Artists can submit their music to online music streaming services like Spotify so that when people search for them they can find it for instant streaming. The artist is paid for each stream she receives through services like Last.FM or Spotify. However, the actual amount is so small as to be negligible, and the real value of putting your music on streaming sites is increased exposure.
In this article, we’ll look at an up-and-coming streaming service that has been around for a long time and is popular in Europe, but has only been available in the US for the last few months, Spotify.
The benefits of Spotify for an artist are many. It is a HUGE and promising streaming site that more and more people are likely to start using as time goes on and it gains more exposure and notoriety considering the amount of music that can be found and streamed for free through it. This is a source of exposure you can’t afford to miss out on given how many people are already using it and who will be using it.
The actual cut you get per stream, as I mentioned earlier, is very negligible. You earn less than a tenth of a hundred per stream, and you’d need millions and millions of streams of your songs before you start seeing revenue in the hundreds or thousands of dollars, sadly.
Unless you’re signed to a major label where they have people working to get your music on streaming sites like Spotify, you’ll have to do it yourself. Fortunately, it’s relatively inexpensive to do so, as you can use a service like Tunecore, which I recommend to upload your album to Spotify and any other notable streaming sites for a price of just $49.99. This puts your album on online streaming sites like Spotify, but at the same time you get it on real digital music stores for purchase like iTunes.
Once again, it’s all about exposure, as well as making your music as available as possible to your fans wherever they are and through whatever music service they feel comfortable with and frequent, and Tunecore does that for you with a few clicks of your mouse.
Remember that the best place right now for an independent artist to sell their music is through a free service called BandCamp where you can earn 85-90% (minus Paypal transaction fees) of each penny you earn from the sales of your music. with BandCamp only taking an industry leading 10-15% for themselves for the entire transaction.