U is for uploading

 

It isn’t a craze, it’s a genuine marketing tool to get your music heard by the right people – online. But, first things first, it’s time to start uploading.

Scrabble Word Finder

Scrabble Cheat

It wasn’t so long ago that the Arctic Monkeys went straight to number one in the charts with their single I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor. What made it all the more interesting was their use of the internet to gather a large fan base and achieving a level of success that saw their debut album becoming the fastest selling debut in British music history.

A reason why bands, especially unsigned bands, are grasping the possibilities of the internet with both hands was explained by NME editor Conor McNicholas. Speaking to The Guardian, he said: “When the clampdown came that shut the free Napster down, people were still interested in filling that free-music fix, but unsigned bands were the only way to do it.”

"The Arctic Monkeys were the first band to really develop that and match it with genuine inspirational talent. The internet has become much more important for finding new bands."

What is out there?

There may be many different services out there for unsigned bands and many have much in common. They offer space for your band to upload songs and include the facility to create an online presence with links, photos, and blogs.

Apart from the larger more well known social networking and free music sharing sites (MySpace.com, Bebo and Last.fm) which we’ll mention later, let’s see what the smaller site have to offer.

Artistopia

This site is geared towards providing the space an up and coming band needs for MP3 uploads, artist profiles, gig listings, a press release builder and publisher, fan base maintenance, newsletter editor, advertisement postings, and much more - all for the price of a US$99 one time fee.

Audiogalaxy

Audiogalaxy offers 25MB of web space for artists to upload their MP3s, images and make a webpage for free.

BandBuzz

This UK site is enables bands and artists to build a loyal fan base. Bands can build their profile and upload their music, which will be up for review by other visitors.

iSound

Another free service. Sign up as an artist and upload your music files, bio, videos and images to the site. Also, iSound allows a band to sell their downloads and keep all the profits. You could even sell your mp3s as ringtones. Furthermore, the site’s player can be used on MySpace by copying and pasting their code.

MP3.com

A CNet Networks Entertainment site, MP3.com is one of the largest artist promotion sites online. It also helps unsigned bands by promoting their downloads and sites online. There are no fees or subscription costs at registration, to upload or create and customise your site. But you can sell your CDs at this site who also offer a manufacturing and distribution service – at 50 per cent of the sale price.

Peoplesound.com

The free service offered by peoplesound lets you submit tracks and content to be published. You can upload up to 25 tracks for streaming and a free fan-only download. But, for an annual fee of £40, you can increase your online catalogue up to 100 tracks, and use their e-commerce services to see your tracks and albums through their partner sites online.

Sellaband

This unique site famed for getting unsigned bands a leg up provides musicians with the facility to sign up, upload and recruit fans who can ‘buy’ a share in the band making an album. When fans have raised US$50,000, SellaBand will then arrange a named producer and studio time to get the album made. Then, the album is made available for downloaded so the band and the fans can make money from the project.

Bigger fish

The first name that comes to mind as an artist who made it very big after collecting the most “friends” on MySpace is Lilly Allen. In fact, it is the number of friends on MySpace that tells the music industry the true extent of your music’s popularity.

It is hard to find a band, successful or not, without a MySpace page, and other larger promotion sites, such as Bebo and Last.fm might very well be a tool used by record companies to promote their fold. But we’ll have a look as there is nothing stopping unsigned bands into tapping this potential as well.

MySpace

This well-known site provides a free hosting service that bands, artists and musicians have used extensively. They can upload four mp3 samples, post their news and event details, not to mention collect a friend (mailing?) list, upload pics and videos too.

Last.fm

With over 21 million active users coming from over 200 countries, Last.fm, an online radio station, uses a music recommendation system they call Audioscrobbler. This functionality calculates all the music its users has entered into the free radio service, and then ‘scrobbles’ it – a plugin is installed into a user’s music player for this.

Once an artist(s) has had their track scrobbled at least once, the site will then generate a main artist page, even if no music is available for their radio service yet. The main page will display how often a track has been played on their radio, the total number of listeners, as well as the most popular weekly and monthly tracks.

Channel4 Unsigned

Channel 4’s 4Music is hosting a site giving unsigned bands the chance to be part of their music competition, 4Unsigned. Their site has a range of free features for bands to sign up and make use of, such as uploading on a web page images, pics, videos and MP3s.

Bebo

Making a beeline towards being MySpace’s chief competitor is Bebo, another social networking site where users can upload their music, video, literary pieces and more.

According to the site, over 250,000 artists and bands have uploaded their music to the site, which allows an unlimited amount of tracks, as opposed to MySpace who only allows four. Bebo users can also download any track from the site for free.

So? I’m only here to learn how to upload

Uploading a track is a step by step process that a site, like Garageband.com, can walk you through. Click on links such as ‘Click here to upload a Song’ or ‘Upload track’ etc… and browse for your music file, choose it, and let the site do the rest.

So if you are an unsigned band and have some tunes recorded, then you shouldn’t be waiting for the world to come to you. Get out there and upload your tracks to the world!

Further reading

scenta’s A – Z of making music

You’ve read it. Now review it.

Back to top

Back to top