Bob Baker's Indie Music Promotion Blog

News, notes and ideas on music marketing, self-promotion, artist empowerment and more

September 06, 2006

Sell Your Music on MySpace

In case you haven't heard, the almighty MySpace.com will soon be more than a place to make friends -- it will also be a place for indie musicians to make money.

According to an article at Red Herring:

MySpace, the social networking phenomenon, [will enter] into the crowded digital music business with the launch of an outlet that will allow artists to sell their music directly to consumers.

The service, which is based on technology from Snocap, a San Francisco-based digital music distributor, allows bands and other artists to upload their music to their MySpace profile pages.

Unlike the set pricing that has become the hallmark of the digital music industry, the service will allow for variable pricing. The artists can set the prices for their songs.

This new music sales feature is supposed to be in a beta stage (although I have yet to see a MySpace profile with downloads for sale) and is expected to be widely available on the site later this year.

Joe Taylor wrote a cautionary blog post with some great advice:

Selling music to your fans through MySpace should be just one of your revenue streams. The most effective musicians use MySpace as a funnel into their own web sites, street teams, and shopping carts. The sooner you can move folks off of any external platform and into your own database, the better you'll be in the long term. That way, if any one platform disappears overnight (like MP3.com did), you'll still have other ways to get support from your audience.

Smart thinking!

For more stories on the MySpace/Snocap partnership, check out these Google News links.

-Bob

P.S. Too bad I wasn't able to add this development to the MySpace Music Marketing book. I guess it will have to wait for the revised edition :-)

posted by Bob Baker @ 8:50 AM   0 comments

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