God bless the Internet. Without it, the independent music scene would not be nearly as diverse as it is todayor, okay, maybe it would be. You just wouldnt know about it. While, from a fan perspective, that diversity is great; from a musicians perspective it can be intimidating. With all of those other great bands out there, how do you get people to find you? How do you get them to choose you over everybody else? At the Rose City Comic-Con, the consensus among the Nerd Rock panel was unanimous: the best way to put your music into the world is YouTube because, as all of the artists agreed, Thats how people listen to music now. It certainly seems to be true for The Doubleclicks a sister duo who made up part of the panel. The Doubleclicks video
addressing the Fake Geek Girl cultural backlash, Nothing to Prove, has over a million views. But after YouTube where do you go? And how do you earn money? Blogging for yourself, putting your music up on YouTube, having an active social media presencethose common audience builders dont exactly pay the big bucks. Obviously, youll also want to publish your music to places like iTunes,Amazon, etc. But trying to publish to each music retailer and streamer separately can be a huge time suck. Do you already know how to publish music to iTunes? Do you really have time to submit every song and every album individually? Probably notat least, not if you want to be focused on creating more music. Thats where businesses like Tunecore come in. Tunecore will teach you how to publish music--specifically,
how to publish music to iTunes as well as how to publish to all of the retailers and streamers and track your sales etc. This is particularly helpful for streaming services. Those portions of pennies can really add up! Your next step in selling your music independently should probably be BandCamp. BandCamp is an independent sales portal for bands who want to sell their music. You create an account, upload your files and then choose your asking price. You can charge as much or as little as you want. You can even let your buyers name their own prices. BandCamp also allows artists to sell merchandise and some bands are using it to sell clothes, toys and even branded dice. The primary drawback of BandCamp, though, is that once you upload music to its servers, it pretty much has to stay there forever. You cant sell something for a limited time through them because taking your music out of the system will mess up your buyers accounts. Note: for physical CDs you can use CDBabyboth to stock up for yourself and for people to order individually. Yes, its true: there are still purchasers of physical media. Theyre rare but they do exist! Beyond the publishing of music online youll want to get yourself out into the world. Tour. Tour as much as you can afford to tour. Remember: you dont have to sell out bars or venues to tour. You can have house shows and play in free outdoor spaces. In 2011, independent musician Marian Call set up a 50 state tour via Twitter. She drove her own car to 49 of her locations (cant drive to Hawaii) and played largely in living rooms and sometimes in cafes and comic book shops. There are ways to
get yourself out there. As long as you work at it (even a little bit) every day, you should be able to build a fairly sizable audience.