Sell your Music Online – Digital Music

Likely by now you’ve recorded your band playing. If not, well,,,, Find a way.  You might be able to find a small studio that will allow you to record (for a small price), most towns have at least one. Get your songs on a disk and get it in a digital music format like the mp3 or mp4 format. Digital formats are they type you will use to promote your music on the internet.

Make a Band Site

Next make a website to start selling your songs on. By doing a Google search you will find software that allows you to easily use a wordpress blog or other style of website to sell your songs using Paypal to collect the payments. A blog works well because you can also talk about your band, add pictures, talk about your songs etc. and start gaining traffic directly from the search engines. Each person you get to come to your site is a potential fan and music buyer.

Likely you will want to use song clips so people can listen to part of the song to see if they want to buy it. You can link to these clips from Facebook, Twitter and a whole range of different sites to help promote your music.

Music Videos

Finally,  create a video. This doesn’t have to be a high budget video, and no your not going to send it to MTV. Your goal here is to get as many sites as possible to show your video. You will need to have your website address as a subtitle in the video so that people know where to buy the song and get more.  This video should be hosted on a video hosting site to allow people to be able to easily link to the video and stream it to their own blogs. Your goal here is to make it easy for them. Here is a good place to help you figure out a Video Hosting Site to use.

How to get started

If you don’t know how to do all this, which you likely don’t if you’ve been spending your time practicing. You have two choices:

• Start Reading
  There are a ton of websites that can help you get started. Start doing some research. OR!!
• Remember that nerd you used to push around in School?
  Suck it up and go talk him into doing this for you. We are talking about the future of your band here! It will be worth it!

The key thing here is to start doing something. The results may not be great at first, but as you start building a fan base things will start picking up. Don’t discount the nerd idea, if you’re not into computers, websites, web promotion etc, find someone who is! A few years ago the only way to get a band moving was to play at clubs and hope a record producer finds you. That’s not the case anymore. You can get your self started and visible to a huge audience via the web.

Once you got your Music Video hosted somewhere shoot us an email with the link and tell us about yourself. If we like the song we’ll stream the video from this site to help you promote it! contact@thedigitalguitar.com

Sounds pretty good, huh? Sounds like the life of a rock star, right? What is it, you may ask. Probably not what you are thinking, not too many people think of making this a part of their career as musician, but as you can see it definitely has a benefit or two.

Cruise Line Entertainer

What are we talking about? A cruise line entertainer. Probably a new idea for you, but this is definitely a pretty sweet job. You will be playing an average of 3-4 hours a day, so you will be getting lots of practice time to get better. And what do you do with the other 20 hours of your day? What ever you want, you are on a cruise line. If you have never been on a cruise liner, these are some things you can expect.

What You Can Expect

Buffets that never close for the night. Full Las Vegas style buffets that have everything you can think of. Not just any run of the mill cooks either. Cruise ships hire the best of the best. Some of the chefs in the world work on cruise ships. It is not uncommon to see whole art galleries made up entirely of fully editable chocolate sculptures.

Many of the cruises make stops in different countries. If you’re not working (I mean playing your guitar) guess what, you can go check out the island. We are talking about Caribbean paradises, the places you see on the post cards.

As we all know cruise ships are for vacations, so as you can guess the general atmosphere is a constant party. This is a lot of people’s only vacation for a while, so they are looking to have fun. So whatever you can think of that a person would want on a vacation, there is probably something of the sort of the ship. And the best part of it is, most people pay a decent sum of money to be there, while you are getting PAID a decent sum of money to be there.

What You Need To Be

Sound’s pretty good right? Do I have you convinced? If I do, good, it is a pretty plush job, but once again nothing comes easy. They do not want just any guy that played in a garage band for 6 years. You have to be GOOD. You need to be very versatile, you need to be able to play many types of music.

And once again the type of music you are going to play is going to stray away a little bit from the typical heavy metal. For the most part that is not something you are going to play a typical cruise ship.

To give you an idea of what they are looking for, it is good to know that the majority of the music in cruises is either easy listening music or dancing music. Caribbean style bands are also seen a quite a bit.

Another area that might be of a little more interest to a lot of you is solo guitarist/vocalist. These typically play in a bar type atmosphere. Often times they are required to play rock, country or popular music.

In all cases on a cruise ship, you need to be a versatile, highly skilled musician. Also formal training is almost a necessity. Even the guys that play as a solo guitarist/vocalist in many cases are required to play with an orchestral at times. Which usually means being able to site read music; I know what you are thinking.

I’m not going to collage to play music. You don’t learn rules to rock out, you just feel it. While this is true many of the tips that are talked about on this site come straight out of music theory, the stuff you learn when you go to collage. They can really help you to be a better musician no matter what genre of music you are playing.

Even if playing this type of music the rest of life isn’t your goal and your dream is to be great rock star, getting paid to perform 3 hours a day while getting endless drinks and food isn’t a bad way of working up to your goal. For more information on being a cruise line musician you can visit Ocean Bound.com. Here is also a list of Cruise Ships that hire these types of entertainers.
Carnival Cruise Lines
Princess Cruises
Norwegian Cruise
Disney Cruise

It takes more than just being a very good musician. It also takes being at the right place at the right time. You could be an excellent guitarist and never quite make it because you were never at exactly the right place.

Hey, maybe some of you will make the big time, but it still could be 5, 10 years down the line. In the mean time are you happy living in you parents basement waiting for your big break until you’re 45 cause you don’t have a real job? Maybe you’re OK with that and your parents don’t mind having a 45 year old child living with them. If that is the case, more power to you.

But, if you’re not OK being jobless, living with your parents until you die, You might be happy to know there are ways of making money as a professional musician without making the big time.

One of the ways you can do this playing for weddings. I know, probably not what you wanted to here. Wedding music may not quite be your alley, but a good musician is a good musician. A good musician is versatile and can play many different types of music. Including the softer more romantic music.

Doesn’t mean you have to completely ditch your acid rock or heavy metal. Just means you need to add some new songs to your collection. Remember this is to help you make a living as a musician, or at least get by until you make the big time.

Yes, if you are playing weddings you do have to be selective about what you play. Not just any selection of music will do the trick. If you have ever seen the Wedding Singer before with Adam Sandler, you know this is true. Love Stinks is not what the people are going to want to hear on their wedding day. For that matter neither is Eruption. Just like Adam Sandler if you are playing that type of music you are libel to get decked by the bride’s father.

Ok, maybe you just cannot get used to the idea of playing the romantic wedding type music. Maybe, just maybe you can make a compromise and be a DJ at a wedding. You can also make some decent money as a DJ.

Now you probably thinking Ok, I think I can do this. It is not exactly what I want to do, but I can make a few bucks while I am waiting to get where I want to be.

It still isn’t going to real easy it is still going to take some work on your part. You need to get know as the type of musician or DJ people want at there wedding. They don’t want just anyone; they want someone that is experienced, someone that can really make their wedding day special. How do you go about getting this type of recognition?

Diana (a professional Wedding Planner) tells exactly how to do this, She says “Having someone who’s knows the local DJs of band will help
make sure that you get the right person for you wedding, especially if you
are planning a destination wedding a distance from where you live.”

That’s right you need to get in with the wedding planners. They are the ones that people come to when they are planning their wedding and they are ones that are going to get you the business.

Just a little food for thought, Being a wedding singer or DJ may not be where you want go, but it just may help you get there.