Free Music Downloads

I want to release one of my (non-audiojungle) songs as a free download from myspace soon. I was just wondering if anyone has any ideas for how/where I can host the file that I’m offering?

I want to be able to monitor the amount of downloads of the song (preferrably the location of the person downloading also and any other stats that are relevant), but would rather not stream the track, as I would have a short sample of the song in the myspace player anyway.

Any ideas?

Thanks,

J

Hmm well you can host it on my server if you would like (I have unlimited hosting space and bandwidth) – my server name is sonicoctave.com (theres no webpage if you go to there, but theres a few things I have hosted there)

In terms of wanting to know how many times someone has visited it or downloaded it you need to make a download counter in php. You can get free visit counters from sites which you just embed on the page where its hosted really easily (but they don’t look great)

Let me know if you want help or want to host it on my forum

The MySpace player allows you to set free download for your song and keeps track of the number of downloads for you.

If you want to have more personal control, you could arrange download through a .php proxy, which counts the download in a database and then redirects the user to the actual file. That would require you to get web hosting and some php programming to get the proxy and database set up.

The MySpace player allows you to set free download for your song and keeps track of the number of downloads for you. If you want to have more personal control, you could arrange download through a .php proxy, which counts the download in a database and then redirects the user to the actual file. That would require you to get web hosting and some php programming to get the proxy and database set up.

Yea I can set this up for you if you wanted – I have the hosting, and could find the php source code for it – shouldn’t be too hard…I’m thinking on setting this up for everyone over at www.filmandgamecomposers.com aswell

As Clublime mentioned, MySpace allows you to offer the song for download and tracks those downloads for you.

Personally, I’ve got a nice cheap hosting account from GoDaddy that works well for me. If you’re planning to do this for the long haul it’s a worthwhile investment.

yea you would be better off getting your own hosting if you are planning on doing it in the long run – you can get hosting and a domain for not too expensive nowadays depending on what you want

As Clublime mentioned, MySpace allows you to offer the song for download and tracks those downloads for you.

Yeah, I thought about that, but since myspace updated their player recently, the statistics have been a bit messed up and it has been very unreliable. A lot of artists have been complaining about this.

Also, the songs in my myspace player aren’t the full versions of each song, they are lower quality, shorter previews of my songs that I compressed for faster loading/streaming times. I don’t want to be offering those versions for download.

Thanks a lot for the offers and the advice so far btw.

Has anyone used a service like Soundcloud.com? I saw that on your forum Musicformedia, and wondered whether that was worth signing up for..

Yea soundcloud is supposed to be fairly good alright – someone from a large stock music site wants me to use it to send files to them – seems like its a good resource – will let you know when I try it out this week

You may release your songs on myspace, but perhaps it is difficult to offer a download link, you should not worry about it, how about letting them record streaming music directly, this will be a legal and proper method.

I think reverbnation would be a great choice. You can upload higher quality versions of your songs in full, for both streaming and downloading. Reverbnation gives you a large number of analytics as well, and it is possible to sell your songs in your own reverb store.

Here is a link to my profile on Reverbnation: http://www.reverbnation.com/ericmorris

I currently have 20+ songs and snippets of songs uploaded there.

I am able to employ players on my myspace, facebook, and in blogs with my reverbnation account.

You should check it out and see if it will work for you. If you do, send me a link and I will fiend you on the site and try to help promote you there.