While writing my article on link baiting for musicians I realized that this topic is overdue. besides the fact that Facebook is highly overrated this is probably the most valueable piece of advice I wrote in my blog so far.

Quick answer: “where to upload your music”:

• You upload all of your music to the internet.
• It is your best asset and marketing tool. Nothing will help more to attract fans
• But you don’t upload it everywhere. You only upload it on your website.

There might be exceptions to the rule but the fact of the matter ist that your music is the best content you have. Why woud you want to put it to some other site and increase that sites value?
In fact everything I describe here works even better if you give your music away as a download

Explainations

If there is one thing your fan is most certainly interested from you it is probably your music. On the other side you are – or at least should be – interested in talking to your fans. Myspace became so popular because it was the first more or less legal spaces where fans could listen to music. Great for the founders but what about the musicians? There have been complaints that myspace wasn’t paying royalties for the music…
Look at the following graphic by http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/how-much-do-music-artists-earn-online/ and understand the flow of money and value chain in music industry.

Even though you don’ tmake money directly when streaming from your site. You give away user data something much more valueable if your music is being streamed on other sites (no matter if they pay you royalties like last.fm and spotify or not just like our good old friend Facebook!)
You don’t belief how valueable user data are? Remember Google one of the most valuable companies in the world has business models around user data and making 30 billion $ per year of it.
Of course having music on other sites might lead some of the customers from those sites to get to know your music but let us have a look at the numbers and understand the potentials of streaming the music yourself and making profit of the data.

Having music on your page results in huge benefit and sales opportunities

From the image we saw 1.5 Mio. listens on last.fm are equivelent to selling and distributing your music just by yourself to 143 people. Let us see how many sales 1.5 Mio. streams on your homepage should produce once you start a conversion with the people streaming your music.
Let us assume the player on your homepage allows a user to stream 2 or 3 songs right away but asks him to register before he streams more music. Since you also needed to be registered with last.fm let us assume that the 1.5 Mio streams really came from people who registered on your site! Also assume that next to the player are several shopping opportunities for merchandise and cds.

50’000 Fans produce 1.5 Mio streams

According to Lady Gagas Last.fm profile 2.389.882 fans produced 122.908.193 streams. This means 51 streams per fan. With the In Legend facebook app I recorded about 10 Streams per registered fan. Let us take the average of 30 streams per registered fan. Under this assumption 1.5 Mio streams are produced by 50’000 registered fans!

50’000 fans streaming music in your page can result in sales of 28’400 $

To understand this let us talk about conversion rates in online marketing. For selling Ballads n Bullets I have experienced conversionrates around 4% which is not to high for online marketing but still reasonable.
4% of 50’000 fans = 2’000 cd’s your fans should buy. If you earn $8 per CD because you distribute it yourself this makes you earn 16’000 $ which is about 14 times more than your royalties at last.fm
If you ditribute via amazon you will get additionally comissions for the other purchases of users. In this amount of purchases you should earn 7,5 % comission on amazon. From my experience about only 1/3 of your amazon sales come from your music. So you can add another 7.5% of 32’000 $ which is 2’400 $
Let us assume the conversionrate on merchandise is half the one from your cd. On merch you should also have earnings of 10$ ==> 10’000 $ of merchandise earnings
Result: 16’000$ (CD) + 2’400$ (Amazon Comission) + 10’000$ (merchandise) = 28’400 $ earnings!
Do you see how much potential you give to other sites if they have your music or videos! I did not include selling tour tickets or increased benefits in search engine optimization and other options for Customer Relation Management!