Music is an integral part of our lives and there is a musician inside each of us. Some of us have the courage and the perseverance to bring that musician out and start their music careers. Life is not easy for such beginning artists, the indie musicians and bands, who do not have a record label supporting them through. How can you focus on creating good music, when you are worried about publishing and distributing the music? Thankfully, the Internet has many solutions for your needs. We will look at three such solutions today – Last.FM, Grooveshark and BandCamp.
Last.fm is a popular Internet radio site and claims well over 30 million active users spread across the globe in over 200 countries. Last.fm builds a music profile according to the musical taste for every user by the recording details of every song the user listens to. This profile is stored in their database. The Last.fm service then serves music to the users according to taste and helps them make relationships with users of similar taste. For users outside UK, USA and Germany, the radio services are paid. Last.Fm also provides services for music labels.
Now, in addition to its service offerings Last.FM also provides services for Artists to publish their music and distribute it over the Last.FM network. As a consequence of its profiling system, the biggest benefit of publishing music is that it gets delivered to the right audience almost right away. Additionally, your music has access to a huge number of active users on the network. Last.FM also provides you with event management services so that you can organise and manage your own gigs. Add to this a detailed reporting system and a royalty program to share ad revenues generated through streaming of your music over the Last.fm network. Last.fm indeed makes for a very tempting platform for Indie Bands.
To begin your music career on Last.FM or for more details – check here: http://www.last.fm/uploadmusic
Grooveshark is an online music search engine that also allows for streaming music and recommending music to your network. Even though its member-base is smaller than Last.fm (only about 500,000) and there is no profiling system in place, grooveshark still streams well over 50 million songs per month to its users. Groovesharks is a rich internet application with twitter like functionalities for following members.
Groovesharks also provides services for indie bands. As a Grooveshark Artist, You can upload your music and share it with the users on Grooveshark. In addition to its user base with features like TinySong and Twisten.fm you can share your music even across platforms. Additionally, Grooveshark provides licensing services so that your music is always protected, plus the ability to sell your own merchandise as well. There is an extensive range of services for Indie artists here – the ability to get your music studio mastered by Grooveshark, or get independent reviews, get remixed or distributed through RouteNote. Grooveshark, also, provides Bandcamp (our third tool) integration for selling your music. Another exiting range of services is to expose your music to the music industry through promotions, labels, contests and events.
To find out more about Grooveshark Services check out: http://artists.grooveshark.com
Bandcamp is a service for artists and it helps you set up your online store. They have support for a wide range of audience, ability to sell music at a price of user’s preference, plus it provides a lot of sharing tools to users to share your music across the social media. In addition to these services, it provides teh ability to sell your music in physical units or virtual distributions, provide campaigns and download codes, industry analytics integration, multi-currency support, creative commons integration and many other services. Bandcamp is a fitting solution for artists interests in selling their music than focus on building a following and managing events.
Check out extensive details about Bandcamp features here: http://bandcamp.com/features
While Last.FM has the numbers in its favor, groovesharks has an excellent bundle of features best suited for an Indie artist, plus an increasing active user base.
Author: Kinshuk Sunil (72 Articles)
Kinshuk Sunil is the founder of the WiSy Blog. An active evangelist for Open Source and a enthusiast Game Designer, Kinshuk focuses on reviewing Softwares, Services and Games here. However, a jack of all trades, Kinshuk can be found talking about almost everything. Catch up with him on twitter @kinshuksunil.
