or, don't bother reading this stuff below, read this article by David Byrne (Talking Heads) its a good article about the various ways to distribute music>.

Proper record labels give you money and some time and help to make your music, and being signed makes you feel good about yourself. But to protect their investment they will want to ensure that you make an album that they think will sell. To do that they will try to influence your music. Also, they will want their money back (recoup) and they will take nearly all the money earned from the sale of your music to pay this debt first, before you get any. A lot of bands fail to repay this money and fail to release any more music. Depending on how much of an advance you were given by your label you will have to sell 50,000 to 100,000 albums for a label to decide that it is worth giving you more money to make another album. Read the book: 'Everything you need to know about the Music Business'.

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Back in 1999 i bought a piece of software, MusicMatch Jukebox. I needed somethig to make mp3s at 128kps and this was the only one i could find. I think it was the first time i ever paid for some software. Anyway, when other free progams came our shortly after and after a few reinstalls i forgot all about Jukebox.

But come 2006 i began thinking about copying all my cds to hardrive (as wavs, not awful mp3s) and i needed a program to organise them all. It turns out i bought a life long membership of Jukebox (some programs offered that back then). Its an amazingly long and boring job and so far i have done about 20 albums of ours and friends, 2 Vespertine compilations, transmission, arctic fire and radiohead.

So Musicmatch Jukebox - its ok but it is very memory hungry, it uses about 30% of my computers resources (2.4 chip, 512 ram) and stops my computer from doing things quite often. I wish i could get rid of stuff - download centre and shop. But it looks like i can't. Anyway, i was looking at the shop thing, online area, whatever, and it asked what music i liked so i put in Sigor Ros - it hadn't heard of them, so i put in Godspeed and up came lots of bands, some i had heard of and suspect i might like and others i had not.

Now, according to an article on the BBC News site i read recently most people do not look for new music, they wait to be told whats good by friends, by sites they trust etc...

So, how does a band get listed on these sites so people can find them?

Answer: with difficulty.

Most mp3-selling download sites will not take unsigned music. Someone must promote you to iTunes to get on it - someone like a distributor. But to have a distributor you have to make a full print run of a cd (or vinyl) which could cost £700 or more.

So, is there a way of geting on itunes and all the other mp3-selling sites?

Tunecore seems to be the answer. Not exactly free, it cost me £13 (they're american so they charge dollars - $25 for me, but the exchange rate is excellent at the moment) to upload 'advice to users' and put it on iTunes, eMusic, Rhapsody, Sony Connect, MusicNet and Napster.

Supposedly it takes time to go through the system, maybe even 3 months so we'll see what happens. Will we earn money; i doubt it but i will let you know.

6 Nov 06. Not on itunes yet but are on Rhapsody and Napster. Not sure about the others as i seem to have a browser problem with them, or i don't use their service or something. Still, thats nice. The My Account button does work in mozilla (not opera) but it says it takes 45 days from when they get loaded for anything to happen, let alone sell.

I sent off cds for the 2 tantrum albums to tunecore (i forget why, perhapsto make sure the mp3s are good quality, and so they have them to make cds should we want to use tunecore to sell them). The Fake Tan album i uploaded as lossless itunes so they don't need the album. Also, because fake tan has quuite a few short tracks (less than a minute) i joined a few together so that you get about 3 minutes of music when you buy them. Which is why i couldn't send the fake tan cd because the track listing would have been different. i hope that makes sense.

But its a good start. Strangely Rhapsody has tantrum's
maisie's friend listed as released in 2006, but what the hell.

Anyway, all very interesting.

June07:

So we have earned 8dollars so far- about enough to cover the costs of resubmitting 1 album next year. We get a fewlistens (at 1cents) and an occasional sale. But it is nice being up on all of these music sites.

Oct 07

Currently on 17 dollars, almost enough to renew the listing  of the 3 albums.