In 1999, when file sharing sites like Napster started to become popular, the music market was a booming industry with around $14.5 thousand in annual U.S. revenue alone. Quickly forward to nowadays and music revenue have dropped by almost 50%-a catastrophic loss by any standards. The ease and convenience with which music fans will get free music has permanently changed the rules of music marketing and promotion. While that poor media for key record brands, it has established big chance for unsigned artists.
While the music market battles because of its life, many internet-savvy artists are beginning music websites and marketing their music directly to fans. Actually, the important thing for their success is not in offering music, but making their songs networth and biography accessible as free downloads independently blogs. Going for a site from entrepreneurs like Facebook founder Level Zuckerberg (who amassed a fortune of around $ 4 thousand giving out "free" web pages), these artists discovered how to make profit music by providing it away. Here's how it performs:
The first step is beginning a music blog. Applying free WordPress software--a powerful, yet extremely ease to utilize blogging platform--artists can simply develop a website independently domain names without having to learn an individual line of code. Since the application and domain names are free, their just expense may be the regular payment charged by their web hosting organization (typically significantly less than $10 per month). The entire method can be done by a complete amateur within just 10 minutes. Following another 1/2 hour approximately spent picking a free topic and adding free extensions, they have a fully-functional, professional-looking blog.
Next, they put up a couple of web pages. An artist bio, a contact site and site wherever fans can listen to and download MP3s are very standard. Photos and videos are optional, but definitely recommended. Depending on the number of material you want to put originally, this may take everywhere from a couple of minutes to a couple hours.
Finally, they put up several revenue streams on their websites by signing up for different advertising sites and affiliate marketing programs. This allows them to generate income from what of fans who visit their website to download the artists' songs.
With this basic construction in place, all that's remaining to accomplish is start writing and promoting more music-related content. If effectively executed, the artists will start generating web traffic (and money) in a matter of several days.
It's a near-perfect business design for unsigned artists. Music is used as an application of cultural currency--"MP3 money", so to speak--which artists can use to "buy" fans. The more fans they could attract by giving out free MP3s, the more passive income they could generate by fans clicking on ads posted by different businesses within their advertising system or getting services and products from the affiliates.
With a solid comprehension of internet/music marketing and promotion, actually mediocre artists are controlling to generate a living from music while fully skipping industrial radio, conventional press and key record labels.
Certainly don't assume all unsigned artist is going to be successful with this particular approach. Most don't have an idea just how to begin it. But also for those who make an effort to master, they stand to create much more income online than many popular artists generate from record revenue these days.