Effective ways to sell music online

How to sell your music online – complete guide

From the option of directly selling music to the audiences, to selling it by means of online stores like Amazon and iTunes, getting your compositions up for sale is comparatively simple. There is also an option of reaching out to the digital music distributors, which can help you by making your music available for sale on the online retail platforms like Apple, Spotify and Amazon.

Undoubtedly, the most popular alternative for an artist to sell music online is by using the platforms provided by digital retailers like iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, and many more. There are innumerous digital store available across the globe, but the maximum revenue share in the digital music business is contributed by these few digital stores. Therefore, it becomes critical for a musician to get their music up on these websites. And in doing so, you will need to take assistance from digital music distributors, also known as the aggregators. These digital distribution companies get your music into the digital stores in exchange for a cut on your music sales, or some may charge a flat fee annually on your music to keep it running and available on those big digital platforms. The key benefit of having your songs available in the digital music stores is increased reach to the audience. Many fans tend to buy new music only from a digital store that they trust, and this is the store where they have a registered credit card for which, reliability and trusted music store is chosen by the consumers.

Another alternative to selling your music through the big digital music stores, is by having your own website and making sales through that website. For newer artists, it can prove to be very difficult to spread their music to the audiences as one might not be interested in paying for a song from a new artist. To begin with, they do not prefer to buy music that they may or may not like. Moreover, even if they decide that they might like a song, it is not necessary that they’ll have the confidence in the website to share their credit card information with the website.

In this scenario, a website that can be considered is YouTube. Getting your music on YouTube and promoting it over social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, can help you to kick off your music career. It may not be as successful in the beginning as it would be after partnering up with a digital music distributor as they are experts in promoting and selling your music to the world, but the costs involved are minimal, which makes it a great platform for your music.

More recently, newer routes are being created with SoundCloud, which has a big community of listeners and curators present on the platform, making it a suitable way for your songs to achieve newfound visibility. This is not a traditional sales platform, however, with a pro subscription can enable listeners to add a buy link to tracks, directing the audience to buy through their preferred platform, which can even be linked back to the artists’ website.