For years any band that wanted to be heard and had a successful career needed to sign with a record label, it was very difficult to be heard without having a record label. However, things have changed in the last 8 years, CD sales are going down and the Music Industry is suffering because they didnt heard the fans and bands.

Now, technology is evolving the music industry, people on the internet share millions of songs every day and they can get it legally and illegally. Now fans can go online,buy their favorite songs at iTunes and hear them on their iPods, they dont ker anymore about expensive CDs while they can get the 2 or 3 songs that they love for a fraction of the cost and then hear them on their ipod.

However, not everything is bad for the Music Industry, the internet has opened a channel for independent music promotion, now your Band does not need to have a record label to be heard, you can use the power of the internet to get fans and make a long lasting relationship with them, this is the new power that musicians have if they know how to promote their music online.

I want to tell you a few simple ways that can help you promote your Music online that wont cost you anything or very little and you can get huge exposure if you do it correctly. Before i begin let me tell you that no matter what you do on the internet, if you want to be heard and be recognize it, you need to deliver quality, you need love your fans and be willing to give them the best music and best treatment, failing to do this will not get you anywhere and the bad promotion for your band could spread quickly.

One of the Huge advantages of the internet against traditional music promotion is not just that you can promote your band with little budget, but that you can interact with your fans in real time and hear their feedback, that is very valuable information for you as a Band because you can improve based on that feedback and if you get great feedack people will be reading that and more and more people will hear your music as it spreads on the internet, that is the power of social marketing on the internet.

Now, let me give you some specific strategies to promote your Band online:

Build a Website

There are many ways to promote your music online and many ways to have a page on the internet, however having a personal website with your own domain is very important because that makes you look more professional, you will have more control over your music and you will be able to create a mailing list of fans as we will talk later.

If you dont know how to create a website you can pay someone to do it for you, there are college kids that can do it for your very cheaply. You can buy a domain at godaddy.com, get a cheap hosting account at hostgator.com and then create your site. One easy way to begin your own site is to create a blog on your own domain, with wordpress, you can find tutorials online on how to do this.

Get your Music Online

Now that you have your site up, with your samples, you want your music to be heard and you want to sell you CD. There are different ways to do this, you can create your profile at myspace.com and upload your music so people can hear it, in fact i encourage you to do it right now, its very important to have a presence at myspace.com which is the biggest social networking site with people that love music.

Another thing that you can do is sign up at itunes.com to upload your songs and sell them on their distribution network, however it might not be easy to be accepted at iTunes and it can take a long time before you get approved sometimes. So we need to take a look at other options. iTunes takes $.35 for every $.99 tune sold, so is not a great deal for a musician.

How to Take Orders

We have our CD and we want to sell our music, you can try iTunes there are different views on how good they are or not, but we want to get up and running quickly and easily so lets take a look at other options to sell our CD.

There are 2 other great options, amazon.com and CDbaby.net which is the largest distributor of indie music on the internet. However amazon is where you can get a huge exposure just by having your music there so you need to compare your options.

Here is how to get listed on Amazon.com:

1. Get a UPC (for a CD or DVD). For one CD it costs $55
2. Get a bar code based on the UPC. Costs $10 or may be included in UPC.
3. Sign up with Amazon $30 per year.
4. Duplicate your CDs, include the bar code on the outside.
5. Ship two copies to Amazon
6. Send cover scan
7. Track sales
8. Register it (optional)

Our Next option is CDbaby.net which is a great service for musicians, here is how to start:

1. Sign up to be a member
2. Mail them a CD
3. Pay a $35 fee

Then you will be ready to start selling your CDs online, they will distribute your music online, another great benefit is that cdbaby distributes your music to other legitimate music services such as Rhapsody, Napster, Msn Music, MP3tunes, AOLs Music Net, Yahoo MusicMatch and even more.

You can learn more about them here http://cdbaby.net

How to Optimize your Website

Once you have your website is up you want to make sure is optimize for the search engines so you can get additional traffic from them and be found by your fans when they type in your band name.

I wont be getting into some complicated Search Engine Optimization, you just need to know the basic principles.

Title Goes HereMake sure that in your title tag of your webpage is the name of your band or the keyword your want to be found with. This is the tag that you need to look at <title>Title Goes Here</title>

Also write some information and articles about your band, like news, biography, tours, experiences, etc. Those articles will be found by people that are searching for your band on the search engines. If you want to know what are people searching on go to freekeywords.wordtracker.com and type in the name of your band or the keywords you want to rank for.

However, dont get stress over this step, just get a site up, put some information on your band, put the name of your band on the title tag and move on.

Write a Press Release

A press release is a great way to let people know about your new CD, a labeling record, a gig or anything newsworthy that your band is doing. The more newsworthy your press release is the more exposure you will get, check what are the hot topics that gets coverage, create a controversial angle, make a contest or any other idea that you can come up.

If you want to send you music press release online you can use a service like billboardpublicitywire.com to get some good distribution and exposure of your news, it can cost you a little, depending on how much exposure you want. Another side benefit is that your press release can be optimized and indexed by the search engines and be found by your fans as well as in news sites.

Strategies to Sell Online

You can use different strategies to sell your music online, the more time you put in to each strategy the more exposure you will get, however there are ways to leverage your efforts by using the power of viral marketing.

You want your fans to go to yourband.com website capture their information and tell them to buy your cd at your cdbaby page or the service that you are using.

As you start to increase your traffic from social networking sites like myspace.com, press releases, search engines, etc. you will want to capture your fans information so you can contact them anytime you want via email to let them know about new gigs, new CD releases, contests, souvenirs, etc. To do this you will need to maintain a email list.

All the fans that will be coming from different places will arrive at your yourband.com site, the first thing you want to do is capture their name and email address, its simple to do this you need to sign up for a service such as aweber.com and you will be able to manage an email list of a few hundred people or of hundred of thousands of fans, this is a great asset that you should develop on a constant basis. And with that service you can send them periodic emails when you have something new to sell or you just want to let them know about your every day life.

The point of having an email list of your fans is to develop a relationship with them that will not only help you sell your music but they will help you promote your music, word of mouth is the most powerful way of promotion and that is a very valuable asset at your hands.

To get more people to go to your website and hear your music you need the help of your fans, as people start coming to your site you want them to tell their friends about your music, to do this you need to encourage them.

For example you can create a contest, saying that you will give a free t-shirt, free Cd or DVD to the first 50 people that refer more friends to your site. You can use a script like this viralfriendgenerator.com on your website.

If you want to create souvenirs of your band to giveaway you can do it online easily just go to cafepress.com

You can also promote your band with online music videos, if you have a professional video you can upload it to youtube and be seen by thousands of people, however even if you dont have a video of any of your songs, you can create something simple like a slideshow of photos of your band with the music or just record your band performing live and upload it, that is a great way to get more exposure.

If people like your video and your music they will tell their friends about it, there are some amateur videos in youtube that were shot in the streets that have gotten thousands and even millions of views, make something compelling with a clear message or something with a little controversy.

To create your music videos from slideshows and mix them with video clips you can use a free software like Windows Movie Maker that comes with most PCs. However if you want something more sophisticated and you are willing to pay a small amount of money for more power then you might want to check

• Adobe Premiere Elements 4.0
• Power Director 6
• Vegas Movie Studio 8

If you want to read a quick guide on how to make professional internet tv then go here makeinternettv.org

Get your music in podcasts

Creat your music podcast is very easy by using a service like gcast.com you can then embed your podcast on any webpage and let people follow you with your news podcast or music podcast.

Launch your own radio station

You can even have your own internet radio station to promote your music, you can use http://www.live365.com/broadcast there is a small monthly fee for the service, you can pre record, embed player in any website, have monetization methods and you can be listed in the directory of radio stations.

There are other services that you can evaluate like

• mercora.com
• talkshoe.com
• pirateradio.com
• shoutcast.com
• peercast.org
• and many more

Amazon Music Top Seller

This is an advanced tactic that you might want to pursue at some point, if you can get your Music CD in amazon to be in the list of Top Sellers your sells will skyrocket and you will get a lot more exposure in a short amount of time, but how can you do this?

You need to have your CD listed at amazon.com and then once you have your email list of thousands or hundreds of fans that you have grown over time, you will tell them to buy your new CD release at a specific day, if they do so you will bribe them with a free signed t-shirt or anything else that you can think of.

What will happen is that if hundreds of your fans buy your Music CD from amazon.com at the same day your CD will raise in the charts of amazon to the Top Sellers. This is done over and over again with books and Music CDs, so you can do it to, be creative find ways to bribe your fans for buying that day your CD.

The rewards will be a lot more exposure from one of the most visited sites on the internet, so it really is worth it, even if you dont earn a lot from the initial sells of your CD, you will get many more new people to hear your music and become your fans.

I have given you a quick guide on the different methods that you can use to promote your band music online, use your creativity to mix some of the strategies and create compelling messages of your music.

Is important that you have a profile at myspace.com with your music so people from there can see you, also register to facebook.com and make your own band page (facebook.com/business), tell your fans to join your page at facebook.com as fans.

Remember also that there are many music forums for indie bands that you can join and let them know about your music, there are also sites for indie bands like garageband.com, they have a lot of exposure and you can list your songs there as well.

Use the power of the internet to promote your music, if you deliver quality and have a good relationship with your fans, your music will spread quickly.