Promoting Your Music Online

[El Unicornio, mang]

I've recently finished recording an album's worth of music, and I've set up a website to try and promote it, but as it's the first time I've ever tried promoting my stuff on the web I'm kind of unsure of what exactly to do, and was wondering if any other musical whores out there have much experience in this matter. I've had a look at Gazeuse's very nice website, which seems to be the ideal kind of thing. I particularly like being able to click and hear a 30 second sample. What's the best way to do this?

I currently have 8 tracks for download on my site, with an option to buy the whole album. As I've said before, I'm not bothered about anyone sharing my music if they wanted to, and I'd gladly put links to the whole thing up on this site, but for strangers browsing I wonder if it might be a better idea for me to just have samples of all the songs and option to buy it. (. At $10 it pretty much just covers postage, packing, blank CD and whatnot but I'm more interested in getting it out than making money, which I know I wouldn't anyway) I could just put the whole album up for download on my site but I'd rather the album was a proper package, with covers and inserts rather than just 128kbps sound files.

Aside from that, what is the best way to promote your music? A bit of googling has led me to a few music sites which I've put my link on, and I've also submitted it to a load of search engines.

Anyway,any advice would be appreciated. Sorry if this seems like a self-indulgent thread, but there's probably a few other 'whores who would be glad of some useful info too.

[mr rou-rou]

see blue jammers site? http://www.auraldelights.com/ at the top is a streaming flash player, can be easily mod'd in SwishMax

or

using soundnails I cobbled this together example of streaming flash

[El Unicornio, mang]

Ah, I was looking for blue jammer's site, very nice it is too.

Thanks for the link, gonna put some of them buttons on my site methinks

[mr rou-rou]

no worries,

your site is running dog slow for me, invest in some cheapo webspace and a domain name

[El Unicornio, mang]

Is it really slow? Bugger.
Any recommendations for webspace?

[mr rou-rou]

http://www.web-mania.com/

blue jammer is with a cheapy one stateside but I would have to ask him the name,

edit: I think it's this one http://www.gisol.com/hosting/ because it sounds like jizz oil

yup sorry, I waited and waited and a page timed out

[Dr David V]

Completely off topic... do you ship to the UK Unicorn?

[El Unicornio, mang]

Yes, I ship to the UK. Incidentally, the exchange rate at the moment is $1.83 to the pound, which means my CD would cost only 5.45GBP for UK folk! Cheap, even for an album of my silly musical doodlings! Might add that info to my site, actually, every little helps.

Thanks for those links rou. Unfotunately I'm skint at the mo (and got a $1000 dentist bill yesterday), so I may have to wait a bit before I invest

[Gazeuse]

Ta for the coments The Unicorn.

I got a web design company to design the Artcorp site, so I'm afraid I don't know much about how it works...Other than the music streams in Flash. Because I wanted the music to play without needing any external players, Flash was the option to go for.

Blue Jammer is the person to talk to about promoting actual albums online. My Artcorp site is really, 1) A shop front for TV composing, 2) An online facility for searching amongst my library tracks and 3) Samples of tracks which are available for license to record companies. I have got a website which directs people to Amazon or whatever site the albums are available from, but I've not sold a single one. That being said, I haven't really promoted the site much

Good luck anyway!!!