Musician needs advice

Hi,

I write and produce music in my spare time and would like to be able to earn a little extra cash from it if possible. I'm not looking for fame, just a little extra income!

How can I get my music published online or anywhere else and who could I approach? The style tends to be electronic dance and breakbeat but would sound good as signature tunes or background music to accompany videos.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

I play in a band and we used Tunecore to get our music out to the wide world (cost about 19 dollars) and they put us on itunes uk/uk/au, amazon, emusic, napster etc etc. Worked very well for us.

Cheers

James

A while ago I was promoting a good mate of mine (www.ashleybruce.com) and we were specifically aiming for exposure in the US..we found a number of useful sites, but be warned....the music industry is THE most unpleasant business I have ever come across.

Try these guys:

www.slicethepie.com

www.showcaseyourmusic.com

www.howtolicenseyourmusic.com

There are many others..some who specialise in certain areas..

All the best

andy

As mentioned above, we used Slicethepie alot, it got us great exposure and we came close to securing £15K funding for our album, alas it was not to be. However the reviews you recieve from the general public are helpful and insightful. Try it, you might like it.

Hi Carl,

There are a couple of things you could try. Take a look at Audiojungle.com, it's essentially a user submitted music library. You upload your music, AudioJungle assesses its quality and prices it accordingly, then it'll go live onto the marketplace. Well worth a look.

Why not set up your own site featuring your productions? You could sell licences depending on the buyers desired use etc. Unless, of course, you actively market the site you will get a lot less exposure, but it's a space that is entirely yours. Plus you get to set the prices.

Daniel

Facebook & mySpace pages.

Link up with someone like CafePress to publish your work on CD and sell it on demand with no stock.

Look into making it available on Amazon.

Produce some YouTube videos with links to your other pages.

Maybe hook up with some of the royalty free music sites and let them market your material.

Trevor

Hi Carl,

It's a bit of a minefield - you'll be better off firmly establishing the market you're going into first - music for leisure or musical scores for applied background purposes (videos etc.). Of course, you can do both.

If you want to offer the music for background purposes, it wouldn't be advisable to go down the amazon, iTunes route, unless you also had the works registered with the PRS. If you didn't have it licensed, the music could be bought for 79p and then used without much of a legal leg to stand on when you hear it on a cheap loans TV commercial. Producers of videos (like myself) have to pay for the rights from the PRS to use a piece of music (if it's PRS licensed), of which you would get a royalty. This also applies to public broadcasting, public places, offices etc. Basically, if it's played in publicly accessed space, you should receive a royalty. This is advisable if you decide on the leisure route too of course, but I'm also sure you can guess many public places ignore this law. The Sainsbury's I used to work at sped their Christmas album up to avoid it!

There is another less complicated option (although the legal protection is slightly different) - sell the music at a royalty-free price via download and possibly even offer a bespoke composing service. Generally you can earn a lump sum rather then a smaller percentage. A WordPress site and its wp-commerce plugin would set you up OK to do that. It's then a case of marketing to the right people i.e. video producers, venues etc.

If you would like a chat about it further, I'll be happy to!

Best of luck

Thanks guys for the tips. I will certainly look into this.