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Every musician dreams of making millions from their music, or at the very least doing music full time. With the
size of a potential internet audience growing every day and sites like MP3.com registering millions of visitors
a month, musicians are looking more and more to the internet for their financial salvation. But how realistic of
a goal is this? Can a musician find their 'big break' on the internet?
The following excerpt is from the popular book, How to Promote Your Music Successfully on
the Internet.
Will you make millions selling your music on the net?
There’s no doubt that the Internet provides a unique music marketing opportunity for musicians. If you market yourself
successfully, you could find yourself selling music to new customers all over the world. While you are not likely
to make ‘millions,’ you certainly should be able to make enough to help financially support your music career.
Even so, it’s very important to have realistic expectations before investing your time and money marketing your
music on the Internet. As a musician you are going to face some very heated competition. Already there are thousands
of musicians with established web pages on the Internet. How can you compete with them? How can you compete with
every other web page out there?
A recent GVU
web user survey states that 41% of all respondees had purchased
music from the web. That’s great news, right? That’s a very large number when you consider there are estimates
of well over 130 million people using the net. However, another survey of actual buyers indicates how this worked:
70% of the buyers searched for the item they bought, 16% searched for a topic related to what they bought, and
4% searched for the name of another product. Adding it up, 90% of the buyers used the Internet as a modern-day
cross between the yellow pages and the mail order ads you find near the back of most magazines. So the question
is, what does this tell you about selling your music on the net?
Quite simply, it means that creating a web page to sell your music is not going to be enough. Even if you submit
your site to the search engines, you’re not likely to see a significant traffic increase. Think about it. If 90%
of the buyers out there already know what they are looking for and are searching for that particular item or topic,
how will they find you, someone who’s music they have likely never heard of?
Here’s the slap in the face reality: In our experience, the typical musician sells between 2 and 5 CDs a year from
their web site. That’s it. Sales that low certainly do not justify putting your music online. Can you do better?
Yes, you can do much, much better, but only if you have a good product and market it properly. But do prepare yourself
for the long haul and prepare to work hard. Success won’t come overnight.
Before you begin creating your site, there are a few questions you should to ask yourself:
1) What is unique about my music?
2) What general style of music are my fans most interested in?
3) What artists am I often compared to?
4) What kind of information will my potential customers be seeking out?
These quest
