Inexpensive Web Hosting & Free Online Storage 
What’s an album cost these days? On Amazon or iTunes around $10. Interestingly, this is the annual cost for the Chromedocs domain and there are other providers offering web hosting for this same low price. Just type “web hosting $10 year” into your favorite search engine.
My Portland, Oregon friends Wester Daywick have generously provided a copy of their debut album to host online. My favorite tracks are Less Is More and Winnie but each song is superb indie rock in the same vein as Fugazi or Queens Of The Stone Age. For those who like variety, there are 7 audio formats to choose from and tracks can be downloaded individually or as an entire folder including artwork.
| AAC | FLAC | M4A | MP3 | OGG | WMA | WMA Lossless |
…and just like that, an album is online for $10 a year. I’m taking advantage of Blogger and Google working together cohesively as well as 25gb of storage space from Microsoft’s Skydrive service. Bobby, Louis, and Trent can always use some beer gas money. Show them some love by catching a show or buying some merchandise. For more information on all things Wester Daywick…
http://www.facebook.com/westerdaywick.pdx
http://www.twitter.com/WesterDaywick
http://www.myspace.com/WesterDaywick
http://www.reverbnation.com/westerdaywick
http://www.youtube.com/westerdaywickpdx
http://westerdaywick.bandcamp.com/
Content Management Systems, Creative Commons, and Direct Delivery
Throwing an album online is a snap but a band should get some financial reward for all their hard work. This doesn’t stray far from maintaining a blog. For bands with their own domains, a few hours of creativity and an open source content management system (CMS) like Drupal, Joomla, and Modx can result in aesthetically pleasing presentation of your music as well as online payment processing. Check out the Create a Killer Band Site with Drupal: A 6-part Tutorial Series on GoMediaZine to help get you started. If the examples in the previous links don’t have you impressed, have a look a the Pearl Jam website running on Drupal…
Don’t rush to duplicate Pearl Jam until you’ve browsed through the Jets Overhead website. Jets Overhead hails from nearby Victoria, British Columbia. They released their 2006 album Bridges using the voluntary purchase model. With their latest album No Nations, the band is now supporting the creative commons movement.
Jets Overhead albums are available through all the major retailers. However, check out the choices when buying directly through their website…
This band really gets the modern industry. Fans are treated to free, high-quality digital downloads of rarities, remixes, and instrumentals in a variety of formats not just the merchandise being sold.
Any band is capable of duplicating this model or extending it with their own creativity. For musicians who typically lose money after recording, instead of printing 800 discs, reduce it to 50 and host your songs online in a variety of formats. Get on iTunes, eMusic, Amie Street, etc but don’t forget the value in direct marketing. Even if you take a bold leap and offer music for name your own prices, $1 a couple thousand times is a reasonably achievable goal. The idea here is not to sacrifice one method for the other but to adopt both. For $10 a year, the return on your investment has far more potential than any other strategy you could choose from so why not include it in your arsenal. Keep selling CDs and digital downloads through music retailers but pump the direct marketing through your own website where the money goes straight to your own checking account.
