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!

Quick review of the downfalls for online music marketing with Facebook.

Additionally you face the risk that Facebook might be as dead as myspace in the future or that Facebook will simply change its policies for commercial fanpages. They could ask you to pay a fee for fan interaction. Remember the introduction of Edgerank is already the first step. After its introduction only a small percentage of your fans will actually receive your status updates and even a smaller percentage of their friends will receive the interactions with your post. On Facebook everyone has the hope that due to wall updates / comments and likes that his message will spread very far. Be aware that this is an illusion! The awareness of facebook users is so high due to the fact that there is hardly any spam on Facebook. Edgerank is filtering it (and your news!). You don’t believe it? What about this experience? On March 11 In Legend a band with 1450 Fans posted a status update about the release date of the new album. This highly relevant status received 93 likes and 24 comments creating 117 interactions with fans. These interactions should theoreticly forward the status update to alle the friends of 117 people. If that was true In Legends Status update would have a theoretical reach of over 10’000 impressions. Indeed there have only been about 5’500 impressions of this update to facebook useres. Ten days ealier In Legend posted a status update with only one user interaction following which got displayed to 4000 users. To sum up: One fan interaction seems to bring 15 new Impression… So please don’t over estimate the power of Facebook. We have seen that music hardly becomes viral on the Internet. There is just to much out. In Legend for example have destroyed a f***ing piano and the youtube video – though quite successful – was far away from becoming viral.

Becoming viral might be easier since Facebook but still very hard! Keeping these problems / downsides in mind I now want to introduce a method that a musician can probably easily use on Facebook in order to create a viral marketing effect.

Concept for a viral Streaming Application

Instead of putting some promotional songs or snippets online you create a facebook app that will be able to stream those songs. The advantage is clear. Fans have to accept and install the application. This gives you the possibility to add your fans’ emailadress to your newsletter. Facebook is so kind sharing users private data with you, once the user installs your app. This gives you a lower risk in working together with this social network and makes you independent of it.
The application will stream your music but it will only stream one song until a certain amount of people have installed the app. Afterwards one more song will be available for public stream. Now you can always double the amount of people that have to install the App to get another promotional song for streaming. The good thing about this is that once your fans like your music they will not only show it to others but ask them to install the app that more songs will be available. You get your (sometimes) lazy fans finally to do the best promo you can ever receive: “Word of mouth” and wasn’t word of mouth the kind of promo you are aiming for? This will probably work even best if you use music and songs that have not been released yet!

Summeray

Creating a viral merketing effect is harder than you think. And in hardly any case it “just” happens. Consider if this is really cheap and if you can be smarter than the others that just use facebook or whatever platform. Be aware of the technology available and consider consulting by friends or experts. Don’t just follow everyone because this will most certainly not result in “Word of mouth”
Oh and if you now think that programming and maintaining such an app is a lot of trouble and might cost a lot of money I’ll tell you the good news. This app is almost ready programmed and I will share it as an open source project. So why don’t you sign up for my newsletter or follow me on twitter so you will definitely know about the final release as soon as possible?