Distributing Music - Life Without Labels

There’s an article on Ars about how independent artists are not only surviving but doing quite well without labels. The article is by Jacqui Cheng, whose brother is a member of an Independent band called Panda Riot.

The key points coming out of Panda Riot’s experiences were

1.  ”The struggle is no longer getting it there, but trying to market and promote once it is there.” Distributing online is easy, the article mentions TuneCore as an easy way to sell your music online through a number of websites, including iTunes. The problem is being heard enough so that fans eventually buy your music.
2. MySpace is a great way to not only let your music be heard, but also measure reaction from listeners. From the article -
   

   MySpace is particularly useful on the band’s end because it provides a play counter on their embedded music that lets them measure reaction to certain things (new reviews going up, a feature on Internet radio, etc.)

3. Using P2P, bittorrent or other file sharing stuff is actually good. Panda Riot’s experience -
   

   The folks from Panda Riot recounted a story about their album showing up on BitTorrent and a number of other P2P networks—somehow, they found a site that listed how many times the album had been downloaded and they saw that it was relatively high. “At first, we were going to send a takedown notice, but then we decided to keep it up and see what happens,” Cook said. So… what happened?

   “Well, our sales doubled.”

So what are you doing as a musician to be heard more and more?

Of course if you think that it is problem that if people already have your music of filesharing programs why will they buy your music off TuneCore? Well, you know our answer - let them support you monetarily without needing to buy your music. Let them support you with Karmafan!

Read the article from Ars for the details of the Panda Riot story. Thanks Jacqui for sharing Panda’s experiences.