Selling Albums

[64Guitars]

The admin team has discussed this issue and decided that we don't want any hint of commercialism on Songcrafters, so album sales/promotion will not be allowed from now on. What I'd suggest instead is to create an artist/band website somewhere else where you can freely sell and promote your album. Then, in your Songcrafters profile under "Forum Profile Information", you can set the "Website title" and "Website URL" fields to your website so that interested members and guests can get to your site by clicking the website link () under your avatar. You could also put a link in your signature, as long as it's not blatantly promotional.

There are two conditions regarding links to external sites:

1) The site cannot be 100% commercial. So a site about yourself, your family, your band, your equipment, influences, interests, other hobbies, holiday photos, etc. is okay. If one of the pages on that site is devoted to your album that's fine too. But if the entire site is designed solely for the promotion and selling of your music, then that would not be allowed as it's entirely commercial.

2) The text of any links to your site should not be blatantly promotional. So a link in your signature, for example, with just the name of your band, or "Visit my weebly.com site", "My Reverbnation site", etc. is okay. But a link that says "Click here to buy my new CD" would not be allowed because it's promotional.

I think a one-time post mentioning the completion of an album would be allowed as long as it's meant to be informative rather than promotional. You could perhaps talk about how long it took to complete the album, what new equipment, software, or techniques you used during the recording of the album and what you learned from them, problems encountered along the way, etc. Anything like that which would be of interest to Songcrafters members. Then you could say something like "See my website for more information about the new album".


I'd also like to point out that Songcrafters is all about freely sharing our music. If a few members decide to try selling their music, that's fine as long as they don't promote it at Songcrafters. And we wish you much success. But I'd encourage all of our members to consider sharing their music freely instead. If you're thinking of selling an album solely as a means of distributing it rather than for profit, I think there are better ways to accomplish that and I'd be happy to help you with it. For example, you can create a website where people can listen to the album and download it for free. I recently created such a site for oldrottenhead here:

https://songcrafters.org/oldrottenhead/index.html

You could also create a CD image which people could download and burn directly to a CD. That way, you can control the song order, inter-song spacing, etc. I can help with that if you don't know how to do it.

Giving away your album freely might be a better means of distribution than selling it because more people will be willing to give it a listen. And you never know, someone might hear your free album and offer you some gigs or a recording contract. Or maybe they'd offer to buy the rights to use your original song in a movie, TV show, or commercial, for example. So, in the end, you could make more money by sharing your music freely than if you'd tried to sell it (fewer people might hear your music if you sell it).

I think that the future of music lies mainly with talented amateurs freely sharing their work via the internet. And Songcrafters is a pioneering site in that future. We don't want to tarnish the free spirit of Songcrafters by allowing any commercialism. There are plenty of other sites where music sales are allowed and encouraged. We suggest you use those sites if you want to sell your music, and use Songcrafters for the music you want to share freely.