Sharing self-made music

Forostar

Forostar

Ancient Mariner
Hiya,

@Yax
@MrKnickerbocker
@Saapanael
@The Mid-Distance Runner
@SinisterMinisterX
@Mosh

and everybody else who likes to say something about this:
Would you share(!) some experience with sites you prefer to put your music on. What did you use? Bandcamp, Soundcloud, anything else? What was your goal? Streaming? Downloading? Attract as much attention as possible? Or just a free and easy to use site?

Myself I am especially looking for an easy to use and free site, using it probably for streaming only. I'd also like to have room for adding info about an album and song, e.g. credits (playing and writing credits differ per song) and perhaps also lyrics.

The stuff I'd like to put online is older music (2009 - 2011) with Dutch poems by a friend, not really sung, mostly spoken word. Some of it is funny, other more serious, philosophical, but I doubt it is of much interest to non-Dutch, and very hard to translate because it has many puns.
 
I use a couple of sites for sharing my music.

Bandcamp is perfect for uploading albums (it's basically album-based). It's very simple. You can add lyrics, credits, cover artwork etc. You can set price for your music or make it free (however, there is limit for free downloads - 200 per month as far as I remember). If you want to sell music, you link it to your PayPal and the money goes there. Bandcamp takes some %, if you earn a lot, but I'm not sure how it works... I really like this site. It has a very useful 'statistics' tab. You can track the buzz easily. Soundcloud is good for standalone tracks. E.g. to make a portfolio and upload a new track once in a while. The site is okay, but bugs happen... And there used to be some spambots - not that much lately. There is a limit on how much music (in minutes) you can upload as a free user. I don't remember what the exact limit is. Last but not least, there is YouTube. It's very convenient, because everybody is used to it.

I don't think any of these sites is particularly good to gain attention on its own, but I think it's most likely that people find you by accident on YouTube.

From what I understood, Bandcamp seems to be the best choice for you.

PS. Ah, and of course fanpages on Facebook are useful for spreading your music! But there you just provide a link to Bandcamp or whatever.
 
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I'm actually just getting into this myself (announcement coming tomorrow!), so perfect time to ask this question!

All in all, if you're going for visibility the answer is: use all of them.

I believe Bandcamp is the best all around music site for providing content to listeners. It's simple to use, simple to navigate, and has an easy, honest pay structure if that's something you're looking for. You can tailor each "page" to a different "release" with artwork, lyrics, and info.

Soundcloud is a good format for just audio streaming. It's an easy way to gain attention because people just stream through suggested things and similar styles.

YouTube is also good for getting random attention and ease of use - it's very shareable. But you need to fit your content a bit more to the format, whether that means a picture, a montage, a lyric video, a music video, whatever.
 
I've only used Youtube for posting music, but I also wasn't concerned about presenting my stuff as an album by a band. If I were going that route, I'd use Bandcamp.
 
I agree with what the people said above.

I use both Bandcamp and Soundcloud mainly. I use Bandcamp for full albums/eps, major projects basically. Like Knick said, it has a great design and format. I've also found more and more established artists with record deals go the bandcamp route as a way to distribute their albums. Often times it replaces their main website. Buckethead and Spock's Beard are two examples. There's also a ton of really great metal there too, if you care to look around what other users are posting. I've also found more spoken word type things on BC, as opposed to soundcloud.

Soundcloud is more to upload individual songs that I don't really plan on doing anything with. A song diary, more or less. It's much easier to network on soundcloud too, since you can post comments and "follow" people.

For what you're doing, Foro, I would go for the bandcamp route. Especially if you want to upload it as a unified project. Make sure you tag it as "Dutch" too! When I check my bandcamp demographics, I find that "denver' is a tag that gets my site a lot of attention (the statistics column on BC is also very cool). This also led to my first gig opportunities.
 
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