5 Rules For Sharing Music on Your Website
As would-be musicians continue to find their place on the internet, it is becoming increasingly important for those of us with an interest in making it our career or full-time hobby to stand out from the crowd. When virtually anyone can create a YouTube video of a pardoy song that they wrote in five minutes and get millions of hits, the type of content that you create and share with the masses is almost inferior to the amount of quality content that you put out. It's equal parts talent, skill and dumb-luck that puts some musicians in the playlists of people all around the world, so you'll need to make sure you find an easy way to get your content out there fast and efficiently for your fans to listen-to and share.
That said, you also need to publish your audio tracks the right way. Every day, as we surf the internet for more funny cat photos and Epic Rap Battles, we come across a plethora of musicians who, with all of the best intentions, have no clue what they are doing when sharing their music on a website. That's why we've created this list of rules for you to follow - and why we know that if you do follow them, you'll already be ahead of the game.
Granted, following these rules isn't going to guarantee that you get noticed by the masses, but it will make the ways easier when you're trying to do so. Click through the break below to see 5 rules to sharing music on the internet, and what you can do to keep your fans coming back for more.
5. Put everything in one place
There are so many services and pieces of software out there to use for sharing your music, that it's almost too daunting to find the one that makes the most sense to you and your friends. While it is important for you to pick the single location where the most fans will be found, it is even more valuable to create a spot on the internet that you are comfortable with and eager to link to. The thing that you don't want to do while searching for this spot, though, is to spread your work to as many places as is currently possible (which is, roughly, 37 million different social networks and musician websites).
Not only is it just not possible for you to actually share your work across all of those different networks, but it is confusing for your listeners as well. Rather than spending and wasting time trying to take your music to all of your listeners, gather all of your tracks to one location, preferably a self-hosted website, and let your fans do all of that tedious and hard work for you. That gives you more time to make quality music, and let your fans feel more involved in the spreading of your talents. A win-win for anyone trying to create a name for themselves.
Of course, the other advantage to having all of your work in one place, is that if your fans are sharing your work (and they will be), then any new visitors who want to hear the rest of your tracks can quickly and easily get to them. Trust us, you want this to happen.
4. Make the files easily accessed and played
This rule is about more than just putting a readily-available "Play" button next to each of your tracks, but also making it easy for your listeners to control your music. Sure, there are many musicians who have a problem with giving their users control over the music (they want you to buy the songs, not listen for free online), but as Jonathan Coulton has shown successfully, and countless other musicians have reported on negatively; people will support musicians that they trust, and they'll steal your music if they really want to, no matter how many roadblocks you put in place.
Use a media player that allows users to pause, jump back and forth to certain points in the song, skip around to different tracks, adjust the volume and generally just enjoy the music as much as they possibly can. By creating an environment that puts your listeners in a good mood, you help them connect a "good mood" feeling to your music, which means they'll want to keep coming back for more. Oh, and please, do not use a flash player. Not only are flash players slow on some systems, and even slower to load with some certain internet connections, but flash isn't even supported on all browsers or devices. Stick with a universally accepted player so that everyone can listen to your music as often as they like, and you'll see your financial support from those listeners go up as well.
3. Don't forget to add a "Buy Now" button!
Of course, that's only true if you're giving your fans the option to purchase your music (or other items). If you're playing music and hoping to make a bit of extra cash, or if you're going all-in to make this your career, you MUST have an easy to see and use "Buy Now" button for each song and album. With Joomla, you can even create your own e-commerce solution to sell the tracks directly to your users and let them download it via your website, or you can hook into online Music Stores like Amazon, iTunes, Zune or Google Music. Anything will work - just make it happen and put those links right in center-stage so that your visitors can get where they need to go.
Nothing is more frustrating than wanting to support a musician and not finding a way to be able to.
2. Let your fans share with their friends
Equally frustrating to not being able to buy music that you really like, is not being able to share that music with your friends. If you're creating your own platform for sharing your music, be sure to include a variety of social-network sharing buttons to each track as well, or you will find yourself missing out on that dumb-luck chance of going viral that I mentioned earlier.
Facebook, Google+, Twitter and LinkedIn are all obvious choices for social sharing, but don't forget other networks like Thounds, MySpace, Tumblr and SoundCloud. You don't need to go out and put your music on each of those networks yourself (unless you have the extra time and want to start planting some seeds), but at the very least make it easy for your visitors to do so.
1. Don't automatically play the music for visitors!
Perhaps the biggest pet-peeve that we and nearly every single internet user in the world has, is going to a website and finding some strange bit of music start playing automatically in the background. It's grating, it's annoying, and even if the song is nice it turns us onto a bad-mood that is not easily cured.
People like to control their internet experience, and this is especially true if something else is already playing in the background. Every time a user comes to a website where the music or videos are already playing, there is a huge chance that they'll have to either rush to go turn off what they're already listening to or watching in order to hear your work, or they'll close your tab because they don't want to search for what's playing on your website in order to stop the sound. Guess what, they'll almost always pick the latter rather than the former.
There you have it, five rules on how to keep your fans as fans and turn visitors into loyal customers that will stick by you for as long as you keep putting out good quality music. Which, I guess that's probably the most important rule of all - if you're going to share something, make sure it's good. Cause internet-users can be jerks. Just ask Rebecca Black.
Images by BigStock
