Top Five Websites for Streaming Your Music

By NationWide Source - Jan 24, 2014 Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

Streaming music is becoming more and more popular. Fans love it, since they can listen to music when and where they want for free or practically nothing. Streaming companies love it, since they make money off of subscriptions, streams, and ad revenue. And many artists initially love it, thinking it increases their exposure and income. (This often isn’t the case; read this for more information.)

For those considering streaming music, we’ve assembled a list of five music streaming services and what it takes to get your music on each.

Spotify

Spotify is arguably the most popular service at this time. With its premium service, the website allows users to create playlists and save them offline, letting them listen to their music without wi-fi or cell service. The site also offers pre-made playlists and radio stations, and it suggests artists similar to those that users like. To use the service, artists must go through a third party. Visit this page to learn more.

Pandora

Pandora is a radio-based streaming service. They have heavily invested time and money on their Music Genome Project, which finds songs similar to each user’s musical tastes by analyzing every song for over 450 characteristics. Their instructions for music submission are pretty particular, though.

ReverbNation

ReverbNation is almost like a social media site that offers streaming. It allows you to put a plug-in/page on your Facebook page or website, which is a really useful tool. It’s very easy to sign up, and the basic profile is free, although upgraded accounts and additional services cost money.

Rdio

Update: Rdio is no longer available.

iTunes

To keep up with all the other streaming services, iTunes—the most popular service for purchasing and downloading tracks—recently released iTunes Radio. It works very similar to other radio-based streaming services; it takes note of what you listen to and plays similar music. Check out how to submit your music and more details here.

Signing Up

As an artist, you can sign up for some of these sites individually; there are also music distribution companies that can push your music to all of these services. Generally, the distributors collect your royalties from these services (taking their cut), but you keep 100% of the rights to the songs.

A Final Word

If you’re an artist considering music streaming, we encourage you to consider it carefully and proceed with caution. Unless the system changes drastically, streaming music is not a reliable source of income for artists, even with thousands of streams. Putting your music out there for free (or almost free) might seem like a great way to gain fans… but if you make everything free, those fans will never need to buy your music, thereby supporting you. And, most streaming services won’t provide you, the artist, with the data on who is actually streaming your music… which means you can’t contact or track those fans.

On the other hand, choosing to ignore streaming might be harder than you think, especially if you are trying to make it easier for fans to discover and access it. Your best bet as an artist is to strategically select a limited number of songs to stream, and keep the rest of your catalog available by album sale only (ideally through your own website and retail platform).

Have you made your music available on a streaming service? Why or why not? How did you choose which service to use?

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Increase Your Exposure: Streaming Music

By NationWide Source - Jan 15, 2014 Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

A confession: I like physical media. I back up sessions on hard drives. I have an extensive CD collection. When I’m near a record player, you can bet it will be in use. That said, I’m not stuck in the past. I’ve grown quite fond of backing up to cloud drives, and as a consumer I often use music-streaming sites like Spotify.

As a professional artist, you have to keep up on industry trends to get your music out there. You could have the best songs and the tightest band, but if no one hears your songs, none of that will matter.

One of the biggest trends right now is streaming music. If you’re not familiar with it, here’s a quick overview:

When you sell your music, whether in physical distribution or in online sales and downloads, you get the profits and the consumer keeps the music. Streaming is different; the most common sites are closer to traditional radio play, just online and tailored to each listener. Listeners use a service, free or paid, to access the music but do not own the music. This means that they can listen to the artists and songs they like, discover related artists, retain valuable hard drive space, and not spend (much) money on music.

If you want access to these listeners, you must make your songs available on these streaming sites. On the plus side, there is usually a small amount of money paid to the you each time someone streams your song. While the profits from streaming services are not as ideal as album sales, the streaming services can offer increased exposure. As a user of streaming sites, I often check out similar artists suggested by the service. Some services automatically play similar artists. If these listeners like your music, they might regularly listen to you (more money) or might look up where to buy your music and do so (more money).

The major streaming outlets right now are Spotify, Pandora, and ReverbNation. There have been and will be others; be sure to keep updated on which is rising or falling in popularity.

If you’re still a fan of physical media and live performances like I am, that’s great. There’s still an audience for that, but it’s no longer the whole story. Now that you know about streaming music, you can decide whether or not this type of music distribution is a good fit for you.

Have you put your music on a streaming service? Has doing so resulted in increased sales or fans? Which service would you recommend?

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