Broadcasting your Music to the World
Publishing your Music the Free and Easy Way
If there is anything I truly love about living in the cyber age it is our ability to beam our tracks around the world to many people. When I started this was not the case. You either had a record deal or you had to play in grimy bars every night (or both) to get heard beyond the realm of friends and family. Today you can share it with anyone who will give it a listen.
Let me be real clear. Today every studio needs internet presence. Did you get that? Its not an option anymore. in fact, I'll go as far as to say within a few years its going to be internet presence with mobile access on cell phones streaming to car stereos by bluetooth and to people's HD TVs and Hi Fi systems. This technology is already real. You are literally going to be broadcasting to the world. Many of you may be already doing this and not know it!
So how do you get started? There are a number of internet sites that will host your music for free. Or you can do it yourself by getting a website that has MP3 streaming capability. The later will cost you some money, but not much if you look around.
I personally recommend Soundclick. If you pay 10 bucks a month you can post as many songs as you want at the higher 320 bitrate. When you have a lot of songs it's definitely worth it. I think it has the best sound quality of all the music sites. Even at the free 128 bitrate, Soundclick sounds better than Myspace. However, Myspace offers social networking to a higher degree, with a slight decrease in sound quality. Facebook is more of a social network that lets you link up your songs and videos. YouTube.com, surprisingly, is used by some musicians to post music and just a single video image. It certainly does make sense to have files on all free internet sites. You can find SoundCravers on all 5 sites listed on the left.
Having another site Host your Music: How it works
You simply register with them, get an url and password and they will send you back the location of your site and instructions on how to get started. Some let you add your own pictures and text, so you can personalize the pages to suit you. Then you upload your music files. Typically these will be in MP3 format, so some sites will want them in Windows Media format too. You should be able to make these files directly in most major music software, such as Logic, Sonar and Cubase (some may require you purchase a separate plugin). If you don't have that facility you can use a utility like WinAmp or Lame. If you have Apple's iTunes you can use that.
Once
you upload the file it may clear immediately. Assuming your are within common
standards your music will appear on your site and it becomes accessible to the world.
Amazing.
Creating Your Own Music Website
Getting a website frees you from a lot of the delays involved. Plus you have total freedom over content, within limits set by your host provider. You can devote a whole webpage to each song if you like, add lyrics, contact info, bizarre pictures. Get some easy to use web page creation software (unless you want to be a web designer too). Make an index.html page, upload your songs and link them on your index page.
Here's an inexpensive web hosting service
If you go with Soundclick you will have access to embedding tools for inserting music widgets. Here is an example of how it works. You get the code from soundclick which looks like this:
| <div style="width:473px; border:solid #999999 1px; background-image:url('http://www.soundclick.com/images/elogos/SC_ExtBG.png')"> <a href='http://www.soundclick.com/tweakheadzlab'> <div style="background-color:width:460px; height:45px; cursor:pointer; background-image:url('http://www.soundclick.com/images/elogos/SC_460.png');"></div></a> <div id="lower"><object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowScriptAccess="never" allowNetworking="internal" height="60" width="473" data="http://www.soundclick.com/player/V2/mp3player.swf"> <param name="allowScriptAccess" value="never" /> <param name="allowNetworking" value="internal" /> <param name="movie" value="http://www.soundclick.com/player/V2/mp3player.swf" /> <param name="loop" value="false" /> <param name="menu" value="false" /> <param name="quality" value="high" /> <param name="wmode" value="transparent" /> <param name="flashvars" value="playType=single&songid=1369670&scid=1369670&q=hi&ext=1&autoplay=0" /> <param name="scale" value="noscale" /> <param name="salign" value="b" /> <param name="bgcolor" value="#000000" /> </object></div></div> |
Now you insert the code as html in the page's source code. The result is:
Pretty cool huh?
Take a look at my JukeBox on studio-central, where i control the pics, the formats, and web design, yet use soundclick widgets to actually get and play the songs. In the examples below, I use 2 different ways to stream songs to people. You'll see embedded widgets on some pages, or just links on others that call up the guest's MP3 player.
Check Google for web hosts--there are thousands of them out there. In fact, google itself will give you a free website. Go get it!
Once you do get your music up on the internet, come back and post the url in your Song Review Forum. You'll have an instant audience. Ah the days of real music making, sharing and listening have come at last. Appreciate it my friends!
The Tweak,
A warm winter night, 2010