How To Release a music CD on the internet:

1. After recording your songs on a DAT tape or burning the songs on a CD via a CD writer, you are ready to begin the process of releasing the music on to the internet. Other tools like Calkwalk and an Sound Canvas ST-88 will help fill in the gaps.

More info on this process can be found at www.e-musician.com - search through their archives.

2. Get your copyright by filling out the Sound Recording forms at
http://lcweb.loc.gov/copyright/.

3. Have your DAT or CD-R professionaly mixed. This is not expensive - around $300.
www.aeromix-mastering.com is a good place.

4. Your mixed CD is now ready to duplicate. This can be done at www.oasiscd.com. Most CD's will cost around $2 per CD to duplicate. The more you duplicate. The better the price.

Oasis can help you with your art work, or you use Publisher or PhotoDraw and do the art work yourself.

5. Now that you have a few hundred copies of your CD, you will want to get them into an e-store like Amazon or CDNOW. A good way to do this without sacrificing your copyright is to use theorchard.com. This is an independant label company. The Orchard will create a web page for you on their site, and add you to the database used by most e-stores.

6. At this point, your CD is now available to be sold at most major e-stores, and you have a web page with a few samples on it. 

You could stop here, but we can take the marketing aspects a bit farther.


Marketing your CD:

1. www.gpradio.com/TheQueue/default.htm add your entire album into their play list. The entire album will be converted into the Real Audio format.

2. Create a marketing banner for your CD. Help on this topic can be found at www.bannertips.com.

3. You can use a banner advertiser like valueclick.com to show your banner across the entire Internet. If you don't have a web site of your own, you can point people to your page at The Orchard. 

ValueClick is expensive though. 4,000 click throughs to your site can cost $2,000.

4. A better way and cheaper way would be to become a member of Link exchange - www.bcentral.com.

You can submit your banner and have it distributed free (requires your own web page for cross advertising) or pay 19.95 a month and get 5,000 impressions a month (if you don't have a web page, again, you could point people to your Orchard page.)

5. If you want to take another step forward, and get your own myname.com, see "how to obtain a host for your webpages.txt" on the How To page.