So, you've made a cool song and want to share it with the world?
There are a lot of sites, like Soundcloud or Youtube, that let you share your music, but what if you want to put your music in some stores and make money off it?
If you are signed to a label it's easy, but if you are an independent artist (like me) you have to use aggregators, sites that send your music to the desired store. Now if you are a FLOSS musician, you probably are on a tight budget. So here are some services that will distribute your music for free.
The free best tool to send your music to Spotify is Spotmeup. The registration is easy, and the upload is pretty straight-forward. You provide the audio file, the information about the song, album art and you are ready to go! Pretty simple, huh?
You just have to wait some time, for your song to pass the quality control (due to popularity of the site, this can take a while - I've waited for 4 weeks). After your song has passed the quality control, it's on its way to Spotify. This takes 3-7 working days.
As for payment goes you get €0.70/£0.49/$0.70 per download, but they don't pay for individual streams.
Bandcamp is one of the best places for an upcoming musician to sell music, because it gives a lot of control over your content, unlike many other music stores.
When you make an account, you get a custom domain (artistname.bandcamp.com) and the page is totally customisable. One of the key features of Bandcamp is flexible paying, which means that your fans can pay more for a song if they want to support you.
It also allows you to sell your own merchandise (if you have some).
Uploading songs is easy and you can make private songs which are accessible using a secret download code that you share with your fans.
Bandcamp has no monthly or annual fees, but takes 15% of your song profit and 10% of your merchandise profit.
Beatport is one of the biggest music stores on the Internet, but it's really hard to get your music there if you are not signed to a label (the reason is their "quality control"). But still, there are some workarounds.
If you have an EP/Album you can make a mix of all songs on it and put it on sale as a DJ mix, like Red Ambassador did. The downside of this method is that you get only 10% of the profit.
Another option is Symphonic distribution, a recognized distribution service on Beatport, that sells your music, but acts as a label and you get only 50% of your profit (if you are on the free distribution model, there is also a paid model, that lets you keep all the profit, but it costs 50$ per release)
These are some small workarounds, but Beatport isn't currently friendly to independent artists, and I hope that will change soon.
Jamendo
By uploading music to Jamendo, you share your music to over 1.5 million users every month, so it's a great opportunity to enlarge your fanbase. As for paying goes, you don't get paid for plays - all your music is available free to listen and download on the site (using a Creative Commons licence), but you can get money if you provide it to some commercial projects (via Jamendo PRO).
Last.fm
Last.fm is the world's largest music catalogue, so there is a big chance that you are already there. To upload music, you have to claim the artist.You can do that here. You have to have an account on last.fm for this. After that, you select the type of deal you would like to have with last.fm - to collect royalties from them, to collect royalties from your label/organisation or to not collect royalties at all. After that, the only thing left is to upload your songs and select additional options for them: to have full length promos and/or to let them be available for free download.
The payments are done quarterly, and you get paid if your song gets listeners via their radio. you don't get paid for streams on your artist page.
There, you made it to the end. Just remember, to make a music career you don't need to depend on a label that may take all your author rights and put you to some deadlines you can't make.
