Making and selling your own music is difficult but it is possible, especially if you have an ok computer and access to the internet. You have to find a way of recording, marketing, and selling your own music. But if you sell an album for £10, after manufacturing and postage, you should have about £7.50 to pay yourself and your musicians. So, you only have to sell about 3000 copies of your album to make about £25,000 a year - plenty to live on and continue making music. Maybe, because of the internet, this is possible.

Distribution

We have always tried to sell music directly, with little success until now. The Tinkerbell's Dope Ring album: Beetsmakespitpink did get a distribution deal with PlasticHead Distribution which was nice. They took 250 copies of the album and paid us about £2.50 each so we didn't make any money.

Now, through music sites on the internet (www.mp3.com, www.peoplesound.co.uk, www.vitaminic.co.uk, www.besonic.com, www.mp3.com.au, www.avantnoise.com, www.soundsky.com, www.elevationstation.com - many of which have given up) we have had about 10,000 listen and downloads (probably about 3000 of which were downloads) of our music. Now its Myspace and Last fm. I have heard that bands get booking for gigs by giving venues their myspace address. I suspect only Last FM is really of any use at the moment. But it changes every year.

We did give away all our music (pretty well) as mp3s. After a year and many thousands of downloads we are now going to try restricting the number of mp3s to see if we can encourage sales.

We also hope to see our music on Peer-to-Peer systems to help market the bands' music.

We hope that people prefer the full sound quality of the cds ( a wav does have 10 times more sound information than a 128kps mp3), but if they can not afford them we hope they will still enjoy the music in a lower quality format.

Selling CDS from our website: Sign up with PayPal. Make sure you the name of your Paypal account is the the same as your bank account - it makes organising payments from your Paypal account to your bank account easier. Its quite easy to follow the instructions (or have a look at our source code). Thisworks, we sell about 10 a year - but then we do no promoting  at all.

Selling MP3s from our site: We tried Greenlight first but couldn't work out how to plug it in and so went for NetsecurePay which maybe better as they can handle more countries. The buyer phones a number that lasts an amount of time. When that time is up we've been paid ( a percentage of it anyway), the buyer gets a code number and on he goes to get the mp3. Setting up is a bit tricky so ask me if you need help with it. This method didn't sell any after 6 months so we gave up.

Selling MP3s from iTunes etc: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.

Obviously all these services: Mals Ecommerce, Paypal, NetsecurePay, are free.

Oct 07
Currently on 17 dollars, almost enough to renew the listing of the 3 albums.