selling music

[donter]

Just recorded a CD. What is the best way to sell or get it noticed.

[jim1960]

Play gigs.

Another thing you can do is a mass mailing to various radio show hosts but understand ahead of time, they get a ton of unsolicited cds and only listen to a fraction of them.

The music business is not what it was and there's little money to be made selling cds anymore unless you're very well known and loved by the multitudes.

New artists have emerged through social media sites so you might put some songs on YouTube and cross your fingers.

In my opinion, however, the biggest factor is getting noticed is luck. There are many ...and I mean MANY... incredibly talented musicians who work their keisters off and never make it. No luck. The right person didn't see them, or hear them, or happen to be in the car with someone who put on their cd, or whatever the reason.

[runamuck]

I agree with jim1960: play gigs.

If you don't play out and you're CD is such a work of genius that the world will beat a path to your door to hear, get an agent.

[Andy Howell]

Play gigs. But be warned people are not buying CDs at gigs in the quantities they used to!

[JohnDWilliams]

Get set up on Kunaki. They will do small runs and each CD is about a dollar. Use the CD as a calling card and give them away freely. Give them away to “fans“ at gigs. You will probably be repaid with plenty of private gigs from those giveaways.

Get set up on CD Baby. That gets your music on all the streaming sites including Spotify and Apple. That’s where the money is and is also where you’ll get “noticed”. CD Baby also handles some PRO functions for you.

CD Baby will also host a HearNow website for your album. That’s a one page site that you can direct people to and they can listen to your music and see all of the links to buy your music. https://johnwilliams.hearnow.com/aco...in-just-playin

CD Baby also has HostBaby which integrates with your CD Baby account and is a very good, full featured website builder.

Depending on the type of music you are playing you can also pursue licensing via sites such as SongTradr. You can also create a site on SourceAudio but you have to promote that on your own. https://johnwilliams.sourceaudio.com/#!genres

Gigs are way down on my list of things to do to sell my music. Publishing and promoting and cultivating your body of work is much more lucrative.

[Rudy4]

Originally Posted by donter

Just recorded a CD. What is the best way to sell or get it noticed.

Current thoughts on marketing music is always of interest to me.

The entire industry has had a paradigm shift in the logic behind actually selling recorded music due to file sharing technology and the internet. Recorded music used to be a marketable commodity because it could be controlled by the companies that physically reproduced recordings and distributed them. All those old controls are no longer in place, so the logic behind recordings has changed a lot.

It used to be that artists recorded and then toured to encourage purchase of their product. Now the money is in performance and the recordings serve to promote live performance and video marketing.

Individuals have to consider that the large majority of recordings now are vanity projects or are made to use as marketing tools to encourage someone to purchase their songwriting talents.

As an interesting aside, I have a friend who had his music available for free on Bandcamp and was contracted out of the blue by a tire company who wanted to use one of his tunes as background for an on-line only tire commercial. They paid him something like $200 to use a tune, and he was happy with that.

Several of the bands I've seen lately sell their recorded work as "download cards". They are printed with a link that permits purchasers to download the recording represented on the card. I don't know the particulars of how it's done, but it works out well and there's none of the difficulties with getting CDs made, hauling them around, etc.

I've actually heard people say they only purchase music at shows as mp3 downloads because they don't want to bother doing the conversion and they don't want a CD that they then have to dispose of or store.

[JohnDWilliams]

This is a wonderful time to be making and selling music. So many good tools for creating music. Easy access to, and a big selection of distribution platforms with almost no gatekeepers. Instant accounting and auditing directly to the artist.

And, contrary to the popular myths from the internet parrots, artists do get paid.

Way better than the good old days.

[jim1960]

Originally Posted by JohnDWilliams

This is a wonderful time to be making and selling music. So many good tools for creating music. Easy access to, and a big selection of distribution platforms with almost no gatekeepers. Instant accounting and auditing directly to the artist.

And, contrary to the popular myths from the internet parrots, artists do get paid.

Way better than the good old days.

I'd love to see your argument. While we're in a time when it's certainly easier to record music, cashing in on those recordings has indeed become more difficult.

[catdaddy]

Getting noticed: Getting easier. Do gigs and populate as many social media platforms with your image and your music as possible.

Sell: Getting harder. CDs are on the wane. Most folks are trending toward streaming as their source of music. Getting your music onto major streaming sites such as Spotify, Pandora, etc. is essential.

[MikeBmusic]

Originally Posted by JohnDWilliams

This is a wonderful time to be making and selling music. So many good tools for creating music. Easy access to, and a big selection of distribution platforms with almost no gatekeepers. Instant accounting and auditing directly to the artist.

And, contrary to the popular myths from the internet parrots, artists do get paid.

Way better than the good old days.

Sentence 1 - only half right.
Sentences 2,3,4, 5 - yes (but the pay sucks).
Sentence 6 - infinitely debatable.

I know someone who just had her 2nd printing of 300+ CDs (in about 1-1/2 years). Her sales are mostly at shows, and I would venture to guess that at least 1/2 of her sales are to other artists. But her genre and gigs are typically folk/singer-songwriter coffee house (not shop) places, not bars/clubs.

Streaming income is horribly small, but it IS the wave of the future. I venture to say that most people under 30 years old do not even have a way to play CDs any longer - CD players are now only an option on new cars. New computers don't come with disc players/burners most of the time either.

Be aware that places like Kunaki and Easydisc offer great pricing for small batch runs of duplicated CD-Rs. Places like Discmaker offer replicated CDs, but there are minimum orders and the per-disc cost is greater than with duplicated CDs. It used to be that CD-Rs would not play on some CD players (but that is typically not the case any longer), its all about the speed of the player (X24 for example) and the speed at which the duplicate was made.
Duplicated CDs typically do not contain the metadata - the thing that puts the song's name on the player's screen. But I've seen more than a few CDs from Discmaker that don't have the metadata on every track, too.

[JohnDWilliams]

Originally Posted by jim1960

I'd love to see your argument. While we're in a time when it's certainly easier to record music, cashing in on those recordings has indeed become more difficult.

If your only metric is CD sales then yeah, things are pretty dead. I don’t think I’ve sold a CD so far this year.

However streaming and licensing has been lucrative for me for quite some time.

[jim1960]

Originally Posted by JohnDWilliams

If your only metric is CD sales then yeah, things are pretty dead. I don’t think I’ve sold a CD so far this year.

However streaming and licensing has been lucrative for me for quite some time.

This might be a good time to remind you what the original post in this thread said:
Just recorded a CD. What is the best way to sell or get it noticed.

Also, you individual experience is too small a sample size to claim it represents the state of the music industry today.

[rick-slo]

Generally the guitar player that makes good money is the one doing enough session work.

[JohnDWilliams]

Originally Posted by jim1960

This might be a good time to remind you what the original post in this thread said:
Just recorded a CD. What is the best way to sell or get it noticed.

Also, you individual experience is too small a sample size to claim it represents the state of the music industry today.

Is there some reason the music has to be sold in just one format?

But you are probably right - don't bother listening to new ideas.

[JohnDWilliams]

Originally Posted by rick-slo

Generally the guitar player that makes good money is the one doing enough session work.

In my home studio I cut a lot of tracks for other people. Not sure if you'd consider that "session work".

Generally when you play on a session you get paid once for your time. If I do "sessions" for myself, on music that I am writing, and then go on to sell and license that music, I make a lot more over time.

You really need to be in a position to build and curate a "body of work" that you own.