How do you promote your music?

[Niveous]

How do you get the word out about your music? Do you put your music out on various websites? Do you give away demos? Or do you not promote and just enjoy when people stumble across your music?

[fodroy]

I put up myspace profiles and hope people will listen. I'll add friends that I know, but I'm always annoyed when I get friend requests by bands who have over 500 friends. There's no way in hell they actually listened to my music, so why should I listen to theirs? So I don't add anyone I don't know personally, unless someone adds me (and they're not a friend whoring band).

I used to put up albums on my Ball State webspace, but I got tired of that. There was no way of knowing if anyone was listening. If they were, no one hardly said anything, so I said fuck it and took that down. I actually lost my BSU web priviledges. Apparently it's against the rules to host offensive metal albums on the university server.

I still use multiply.com as an archive.

That's about all I do. I'm not a professional musician, so I don't feel much pressure to push my music on other people.

As far as people randomly discovering your music, it's awesome when it happens and they let you know. I'd imagine it's happened many times, just that no one lets me know. I know that I don't usually email bands when I hear something I like, so I don't really expect them to do that. The internet is very strange that way. Many bands are able to keep in contact with their fans, but music also seems diminished. There's so much of it on the internet that it becomes more difficult for one little song to impress someone. And most people are all over the place when they're online, so they're not thinking, "I'm going to contact this band that I've heard on myspace and let them know that they're cool."

The arts are a shitty pursuit for people who need constant reinforcement, and the internet doesn't really help that much.

[WesDavis]

Yeah I agree with fodroy; randomly adding people on Myspace isn't the way to go. I'll occasionally go around adding bands that I like, usually with an accompanying "Hey I dig your stuff" message, but normally I just add friends. I've gotten a lot of friend requests from people I don't know, and I'll accept those, though again, I won't add a band that clearly is just friend-whoring. I know a few musicians in Austin that DID do the friend-whoring thing, and they have well over a thousand friends, and yet my daily plays match or beat theirs a lot of the time. That's because people who aren't your friends or who didn't find you on their own are not interested in hearing your music.

So yeah, Myspace is a good thing to have, but only because potential fans get easy and familiar access to your music. You give out your Myspace address at shows, and everyone is going to check their Myspace when they get home at night, and there's at least a small chance they'll find you on there.

I like giving away demos. People love free shit! So far, though, I haven't discovered a surefire way to spread the word. I think a lot of the problem lies in the fact that when you are only a local act, people don't really want to go see you as much, because you're always playing, and they always hear the same songs. You have to write a lot of songs to keep people interested.

[jimtyrrell]

Since you asked:

I use my Myspace and my web site. The rest is just live shows. I've been talking about doing a full-length CD for years. Maybe this summer it'll finally get done.

[obscurity]

These days, I don't even bother posting them on the web. If it was a songfight entry, I mail it in, but that's about it.

[HeuristicsInc]

I have my website and the few other collaboration websites, like Tapegerm. I have a few CDs available, and I'm selling a couple via CDBaby (and, through them, online stores like iTunes and I think emusic).
One of the ways I sold more CDs was through charity donations - I did one through SF (and sold one CD haha) but the more productive one was from CDBaby where we signed up to donate our monies to Katrina rebuilding efforts. I sold quite a few there. The other thing I've done is to send copies to some places that do CD reviews. They're also fun to read, so that's a win-win. Another one is that I've been sending a copy of each to Pandora, and you can now hear HInc music on there. I know I've sold some CDs because people heard me there, which is awesome. All of these things really require making a hardware CD though.
-bill

[NatchDan]

I have my website. Also I do FAWM and now SongFight! - also my site's on StumbleUpon, so hopefully that works.

[rone rivendale]

I have alot of songs on http://www.soundclick.com and I used to have songs on http://www.download.com in their music section but I don't like their layout and I always had bugs when trying to listen to my own stuff.

I promote my soundclick page on my mypsace page as well.

I HAD a CD out on soundclick as well, but I took it down after 2 months cuz I had 0 sells.

[super dragon x]

I do absolutely nothing to promote my music, and I'm too lazy to add people to my Myspace page.

The upside of that is everyone who finds my shit is there because they want to listen to it.