Creating your own site to sell music

[Cyril Blanc]

Hello

I am looking for some help on creating my own site to sell music.

Thanks in advance

Best

Cyril

[jhonny.eriksson]

Do you mean that you want to sell RTU license or physical/logical media?

Does anyone buy music nowadays? :(

[Cyril Blanc]

Hello Jhonny

Apparently it is difficult to sell physical CD, but you can sell digital music.

Best

Cyril

[Francesco Pirrone]

Hi Cyril,

The best platform for this seems to be Bandcamp, however if you'd rather build your own website there are now thousands of web designers who can help you for a reasonable price and you may find them on places like Fiverr or Upwork...

Most of the time they just build your website though, the hard part is getting people to visit that website...particularly hard in 2023.

I can tell you that I did my own in 2018 and it was terrible and I kept expanding it/redoing it for years but now that all my listeners (and very few buyers) go directly from my social media to my music on Bandcamp and Spotify I went for a super minimal website 'cause right now it's just there waiting for a better purpose.

I know this lady https://ninabayata.com/ and I like her style, if I were to hire a web designer it would probably be her but I never have so I can't give you first hand reviews, just that I have spoken to her via email and she knows her digital marketing which is the key to a successful design.

Hope that helps.

Francesco

[Cyril Blanc]

Hello Francesco

Thank you for your answer.

Since I post I have been looking around, I was disgusted to find out that you get 1 cts per listening on site like Apple Music

So I am also going to have my own web site to sell my songs, 123 company propose tools to make your own web site

Today I have a free web site just to test, when you pay they give you all the tools to sell and have a published name. https://641ec8622c82e.site123.me/

I am also going to put them on Youtube but protected with audio and video copyright messages.

At the moment we are trying to put things strait for the sharing of the money and the work to be done for promoting because we are 3 on two of the songs pop songs ;  they have a full VSL orchestra with synth and drums. There is one version in English and one version in French ; both have there video clip.

Kind regards

 

Cyril

[Francesco Pirrone]

Hi Cyril, you are most welcome.

With Spotify you need roughly 5000 streams to earn 20 US dollars (before tax).

I am, unfortunately, very familiar with these numbers: basically music is free these days (for the listener) and musicians have to pay an aggregator (such as CD baby, Distrokid, Tunecore and so on) in order to have their music distributed to all DSP (Spotify, Apple Music, etc...).

Bandcamp is the most decent platform in that respect, but it's a small niche and very few people are willing to purchase from Bandcamp something they can hear on Spotify.

I personally use Spotify as an additional way to showcase my work, small bands and artist often tell the story of how they make more selling a few mugs and t-shirts than they make with a year's worth of Spotify streams. If you take huge bands the numbers aren't different at all: I am just looking at Iron Maiden right now and their Spotify has roughly 8 million listeners, that's probably gonna yield something in the region of 30 to 60K a month: one imagines that the maintenance alone of a huge business such as Iron Maiden costs more than that... I guess they make way more via live tickets and merch, just like the smaller bands but on a bigger scale.

With that being said I like your idea of taking ownership of the music and selling it directly on your website. :-)

Good luck

Francesco