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Drafts:Free Music Guide

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The Free Music Guide is for artists and musicians on how to make a living out of free music.

By 'free,' we don't necessarily mean zero cost, but rather we mean freedom: the freedom to share and remix your music so that it reaches as many people as possible. Despite what you may think, you can make money this way, and we intend to help you!

In this guide, we look at the ways to get your music out there and heard and how you could make money from doing it.

Got some advice you want to share? Edit this page! Want to discuss the guide or ask questions? Discuss this page or visit the PPUK Forum!

Contents

Starting from scratch

If you've already got some success, then you probably already have the resources and contacts to distribute and make money from free music. But if you're relatively new or unheard, then here are some tips that will help you get started.

Be patient

It will take time for things to get off the ground. Music takes a long time to get right, and it takes a while for the word to spread. Fame and fortune just doesn't happen overnight.

Gig relentlessly

Take every opportunity to perform live in front of actual people, even if it's not very many. Aim for a few gigs a week, anywhere you can, regardless of whether you think you'll get a good reception. Not only will you get plenty of exposure, practice never hurts!

Bring as many people to your gigs as you can, be they friends, family, fans, people on the street, anyone. The more people who turn up to see you, the more money the promoter makes, and the more likely you are to be asked back (and higher on the bill). Constantly send EPs to promoters, invite them to your gigs, offer illicit services, anything it takes to get on the bill.

Be prepared to burn plenty of CDs and give them out for free (see also: Licenses). Ask people to share it with anyone who might be interested (and even those who wouldn't). The more people who hear your music, the more people you'll get coming to see you perform.

Get networking

MySpace is an obvious choice to spread the word and get people listening to your music, but Facebook and Twitter are both excellent ways to communicate with fans, so it's worth getting accounts with them too.

Form a street team of die-hard fans to hand out CDs (see also: Licenses), put up posters, hand out leaflets and get people coming to your gigs.

You can upload your music to BBC Introducing to have the chance to get your music played on the radio, record a live session or play at a festival.

Write good music

This is a must. Without this, the rest simply will not come. Work hard and practice plenty!

Raising funds

TODO

Distribution

When considering how to distribute your music, you need to consider two things: the license you will distribute your music under, and the method by which you'll distribute it.

Licenses

The license lets others know what they can do with your music. There are three general ways you can licence your music: all rights reserved, public domain, or some rights reserved.

All rights reserved

All rights reserved is where you exercise your full rights under copyright law. People may only listen to your music, nothing else. This is the traditional method under which recorded music has been distributed.

UK copyright law gives you (or whoever owns the copyrights to your content, such as a record company) a legal monopoly over your content that lasts your entire lifetime plus 50 years. In a world without the internet or sharing, exploiting this monopoly would be how you would make the most money from distributing music. In the real world, however, it is not possible to enforce that monopoly, and so there is a need to look at alternative ways to distribute music.

Public domain

This is where you completely forfeit all of your rights under copyright law and let anyone do anything they like with your music, or in other words, put it in the public domain.

The main problem with this is that if someone decides to take your music and use it to make money -- perhaps by selling it (or a remix or some other derivative work) or by playing it in a bar/club -- then you have no right to ask them for royalties, and so this may ultimately be a bad deal.

Some rights reserved

Also known as copyleft, this is where you keep some of your rights, such as the right to make money from your work, but allow others to share or remix your music. There are many types of copyleft licenses, but the most popular in the creative world are the Creative Commons (CC) licences. Under a CC license, you can specify a combination of four conditions:

  • Attribution (by): You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your copyrighted work — and derivative works based upon it — but only if they give credit the way you request.
  • Share Alike (sa): You allow others to distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the license that governs your work.
  • Non-Commercial (nc): You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your work — and derivative works based upon it — but for non-commercial purposes only.
  • No Derivative Works (nd): You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform only verbatim copies of your work, not derivative works based upon it.

You can find a full list of CC licenses at the Creative Commons website.

Reserving some of your rights is the best of both worlds: it frees your work enough for it to be shared and remixed, but allows you to collect royalties if somebody wants to make money using your work, or any its derivatives.

Methods

No matter what distribution method you choose, be sure to include your license alongside your music!

Physical media

Despite what you may have heard, physical media isn't dead! 30% of households still have no internet access[1], and 10% of those that do only have narrowband access, which isn't great for downloading media. So CDs are still needed to reach the people without the internet.

CDs are also great for exposure: simply giving them out for free means that more people will listen to your music, which is always a good thing.

Record companies would be able to publish your music onto CDs, but this often means giving up the rights to your music to the company and getting only a small cut of the revenue, so always check any contract very carefully. To avoid the veritable minefield of the record industry, you may want to look into publishing your own music. TODO: how?

Controlled downloads

A controlled download is one where you host your music files on your own server and allow visitors to your website to download them.

The advantages of this are that you can monitor the number of downloads, ask for contact information in exchange for a download, which allows you to get in touch when you go on tour or release more music, or ask for payment or donation in exchange for download.

The main disadvantage is that serving your own files can be quite expensive. Music files tend to be quite large, and to let large numbers of people to download them will need a good hosting package that gives you a large monthly transfer limit (which often incorrectly called 'bandwidth'). Most existing download services of this type, like iTunes or Amazon, therefore charge people downloading from their servers. Another disadvantage that if your server or the service you use goes down, nobody can download your music.

Peer-to-peer downloads

TODO

Making money

So far this guide has not addressed how to make money from free music, only how to make it free.

TODO

More information

TODO

Refrences

  1. ↑ Office of National Statistics, Jan 2010: http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?ID=8
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