anti-mp3.com

[~dorian]

does anyone know any other places other than mp3.com that i can upload and promote my music?

+kristopher+

[seraphim]

Artists seem to be keen on Ampcast http://www.ampcast.com/
Seems like everyone that was on mp3.com either moved over to ampcast or is in the process of moving there.

[~cliffwalk]

Ampcast has been hosting my music for a long time now and I have no complaints. They also have a pretty decent "Production on Demand" CD program.

[~chriswdc]

I, too, use Ampcast. The people seem to be artist friendly.

[7red7]

This is a great thread for me cause I need some info too, and maybe any info given can help Dorian as well...Why ampcast over mp3.com??? My reason for asking, is that I'm going to be putting up my sounds on a site and was considering mp3...And Seraphim made the point that a lot of artists have/are leaving for ampcast or other site...How come???

[~exception]

This has all been said before all over the web, but i'll have a go at it. To put it shortly, mp3.com is a farce, it has become exactly the mega-corporate commercio-trash BS that it claimed to rebel against. It was meant for indie artists, yet now it is plastered with the most mainstream of mainstream artists who have millions of promo dollars and airplays already, so it is no longer a good place for exposing people to new music, generally.
The royalty setup sucks, the "cd" setup sucks (128kb mp3s only). the artist community is swamped with crap, and is very incohesive and erratic.

Mp3.com is only driven by, and concerned with revenue, money, not artists or its artist community. The fact that the site sucks for indie artist follows close behind.. The pathetic commercialism has infiltrated mp3.com in drones, to the point where you see FULL PAGE flash ads screaming obnoxiously in your face and ears when you open a page. The site was sold to a big corporation recently and many things went down the tubes, that's when people jumped ship to ampcast generally.

It's horrible, and a walking contradiction really. Mp3.com has name recognition, so it's good to have songs up there, and it works out okay, but it is not very good for a main promotional base, or a cd selling base or anything like that imo. Mp3.com's charts are also wack, imo. Nothing is perfect, but ampcast is waay better and less cluttered.

[~exception]

Dorian, i would have reccomended javamusic (for a free option since ampcast is not free, but cheap) but guess what..
A few days after i uploaded some stuff there i get an email about their change of policy, etc etc, in other words, "hi, we are changing everything so that it really sucks and you have to pay waay more money than you will make back and want to leave our site" was the basic impression i got..so i guess javamusic is going the way of mp3.com too, lame.
Have you tried IUMA? It's okay, the page design and stuff is very rudimentary, but last i knew it was free *and* had royalties.. but i havent checked the iuma.com status in nearly a year, so it may have gone downhill too.
There are other sites out there but they dont jump to mind at the moment.

[7red7]

Originally posted by exception
This has all been said before all over the web, but i'll have a go at it. To put it shortly, mp3.com is a farce, it has become exactly the mega-corporate commercio-trash BS that it claimed to rebel against. It was meant for indie artists, yet now it is plastered with the most mainstream of mainstream artists who have millions of promo dollars and airplays already, so it is no longer a good place for exposing people to new music, generally.
The royalty setup sucks, the "cd" setup sucks (128kb mp3s only). the artist community is swamped with crap, and is very incohesive and erratic.

Mp3.com is only driven by, and concerned with revenue, money, not artists or its artist community. The fact that the site sucks for indie artist follows close behind.. The pathetic commercialism has infiltrated mp3.com in drones, to the point where you see FULL PAGE flash ads screaming obnoxiously in your face and ears when you open a page. The site was sold to a big corporation recently and many things went down the tubes, that's when people jumped ship to ampcast generally.

It's horrible, and a walking contradiction really. Mp3.com has name recognition, so it's good to have songs up there, and it works out okay, but it is not very good for a main promotional base, or a cd selling base or anything like that imo. Mp3.com's charts are also wack, imo. Nothing is perfect, but ampcast is waay better and less cluttered.

Thank you very much for the info...I'm gonna check out ampcast instead as a front runner for my stuff...It sounds like mp3.com has hit the s*** :)

[~exception]

Yea, i mean dont get me wrong.. if someone is going to randomly stumble onto a mp3 site with indie artists well.. odds are its *gonna* be mp3.com. Mp3.com has had at least 10 times the exposure of any other site of its kind, and it's networked up all nice so that people "accidently" end up there, and since it is really a big corporate business in disguise, it is likly going to get bigger and more ubiquitous in the future..
Frankly, that's why i'm "against" it.. i'm not really against it, i just dont want to see it get really huge and be the only thing that any (average person) knows about, because that will totally lower the bar for artist sites! I think artists should leave mp3.com in drones, so that it either changes to be a real indie music site again, or else goes bankrupt and makes space for some sites more true to mp3.com's origonal suppoused mission ;)
hehe.. :)

[7red7]

Well I plan to have my own site...Maybe I should just offer cd's and mp3's from my own site, and use forums to plug my stuff...Well at least for a small portion of the promotion...Ever heard anything good about this being carried out by someone??? :)

[~exception]

It's good to have your own site, i think it's essential for serious promotion, but the bandwidth required to serve a bunch of mp3's can get pretty high and that costs. I think that's why people usually choose an artist site or two to put some material on. The thing about sites like ampcast is that you can just throw a bunch of songs on there, and link to them or whatever, and instead of paying *more* if you use gobs of bandwidth, you can get *paid* a little bit for using more (in case of downloads only, with ampcast).
So, i'm by far *no* expert on this, but i'd say, maintain your own site, with news, bio, pics, links, etc, and put things up at one or two artist sites, (EG too maybe?) so people can both jump to your music from the site, or accidently discover a song there. You can still use your own website to host files, but if you did it with just a few special ones now and then you'd have a lot more bandwidth headroom for them.. or something
Good luck and stuff :)

[7red7]

Hey thats a headful of info for the day, thanks very much for filling me in on this stuff :)

[Avil]

I would say that mp3.com is still a good place, but too much crap has shown up the last few years. And I just HATE!!!!! the genres they have there...

[~raven0us-]

hm, yea id probably go with the ampcast - but another alternative would be "untoldgood.com" ... this is a fairly new site dedicated to underground art and music, its cool because they have no restrictions on content and it allows high quality 192kbps mp3's to be uploaded. there was another but i forgot hm.

[~midikris]

just want to comment about the big bad ugly mp3.com. First off you obviously have no idea how much it costs to run a mega site like that, of course they are concerned with money. It isn't magically pulled out of their ass and handed over to the ISP people to pay bills. They also don't run their company on interns, and of course they are owned by a major label and you know why? cause they were running themselves into the ground and breaking the law just to offer everyone free dowload services and pay the artists a decent royalty. But when it's all said and done they are awsome for music delivery, you may hate the ads, you may hate the commerciality of their site, you may hate the a fact that your competing with major label artists for exposure but in the end they get people listening to music. If your band isn't getting spins on mp3.com your doing something wrong cause it doesn't take much promotion to get on the charts and to actually do well. Sure they don't have a synthpop category but they do have other categories that people now know to look for synthpop and dark electronic in.

Both of my bands(Brand New Idol and Joy Machine) have done extremely well on mp3.com and you know what? both have done 1000's of times better than on ampcast.com. Were on ampcast.com as well but it just doesn't have the functionality mp3.com has. Plus I'm not into making it super easy for people to download my music so the fact that to get hi-fi on ampcast means I need to give people downloads as well, not going to happen.

Ultimately spread your music as much as you can and people will make a connection, detach yourself from mp3.com and you detach yourself from a slew of potential fans that only know mp3.com. Honestly the goal is for people to hear your music and who gives a ¤¤¤¤ if they hear it on mp3.com? You want fans right?

[seraphim]

Very well said, Kris. Unfortunately it all eventually comes down to commercialism and money. Most of the time that's not such a bad thing, who doesn't like money right? Who doesn't want to get paid for doing what they love? Obviously all the bands here want that otherwise they'd be giving their CDs away or just charging cost :)

[~chriswdc]

Use who ever you are most comfortable using. You are not going to lose anything by trying MP3. I prefer the people at Ampcast, however they do not have the name recognition that MP3 possesses.

[~cosmicity]

Kris: You no longer have to offer downloads on ampcast.com. They changed their set-up. You can give hi-fi streaming without offering a free download now. You can also name a price so that users can pay-per-download if you do want to offer downloads, but don't want them to be free.

mark nicholas
info@cosmicity.com
http://www.cosmicity.com

[~exception]

Kris,
I tried to make it clear that i was not giving my personal opinion about mp3.com, i was merely trying to cover some of the reasons that people have left loosely in response to 7red7's question. I am fully aware of how the economic structure of current high-traffic websites works, it's not too hard to figure out and it's been that way in the case of almost *all* sites for a couple years now, all sites are affected by this balance, electrogarden included!
I still have music on mp3.com, i'm not disgruntled at the site or anything, but i don't appreciate the barrage of ads, i do feel that's in bad taste, but they have to get revenue from somewhere. It does still stand however that mp3.com is litereally a hypocrisy if compared to what it suppousedly origonally stood for. It was the opposite of major labels, etc. I dont count it out just because it lost its innocence, that happens to everything eventually, unlesss it fails! However, a lot of people did protest that, and while that may seem noble i am aware that it is foolish to take music off/not put music on mp3.com, because it has 10 times more networking to other sites, 10 times more promotion, 10 times more name recognition, than any other site of its kind, the list goes on and on, so in other words, more people are much more likly to find someone on there than on somewhere else, all things considered. I dont think mp3.com is a good place to sell albums from though. It could be, if the fidelity of the shipped cds were higher and more professional, etc.. but that's just my opinion. Fact is generally music fans dont care, but a lot of synthpop/electro/industrial/etc type fans do tend to be more aware of these types of technical things i think.

I'm glad you've had sucess on mp3.com, that's great, and i hope you have continued and expanding sucess there and everywhere else too, just as i feel about most artists in this niche of music. I actually found joy machine and brand new idol there origonally myself, and listened to a lot of tracks there before seeing BNI on the top CD sellers at ampcast. so trust me i know from my own experience that people look there first in most cases, if they look anywhere at all.

I was not trying to diminish that fact, and i made it clear it's easy to reach the most people with mp3.com and since it's the most business-oriented of the indie music sites, that is likly to be even more true in the future. I was not discouraging people from participating in mp3.com, but i do feel that it is a graveyard in a way. The reason a lot of people think the charts are ¤¤¤¤ed is because there are literally songs that have been in the overall electronic top 40 for a few years, and so many people see it as a joke.
I dont debate that it's possible to get tracks up there, neurotron606, for example, who i corresponded with a couple times when he was doing a "feedback-based" album has had a dozen or so tracks in the charts for a year or two now, because he does intensive networking and maintains a mailing list, etc.. people who are diciplined can probobly get exposure at mp3.com even if their music is so-so, but mp3.com is not focused on indie music, it only claims to be, the real focus is just whoever comes along that has some pull ;) but hey, it's still the biggest indie music site right? I dont deny that.

I hope i am more clear now :D

[7red7]

You know, everyone has made some really valid points...I too first discovered Joy Machine and Brand New Idol both from mp3.com...As far as availability and yes that famous name, I am still considering putting some stuff up there, but time will tell in what I personally do...Exception you're right on point, Kris, you are as well...I'm not sure how both of you can be right, but you are...Both of you have evenly given valid arguments concerning my question...Not to worry my fellow musicians/synthlovers...All is good and I'll hopefully have something to debut in the near future...Again, time will tell :)

DAN

[~Eyuva]

Originally posted by Avil
I would say that mp3.com is still a good place, but too much crap has shown up the last few years. And I just HATE!!!!! the genres they have there...0

grunge anyone? anyone :p