My friend Dave Hooper wrote a blog post on Thursday about giving music away free music on your website. I agree with his ideas of giving away music on your website. It’s something I tell my clients about in the Musicians Mastermind too.

Here’s an excerpt from Dave’s post:

Not everyone who visits a website is ready to make a purchase.  In many cases, people are just browsing.  So even if the website is the main portal through which customers buy your music (or other merchandise), an equally important purpose of the website is to generate leads. 

Creating an ezine or newsletter is a common “freebie.”  It certainly works on this site.

Subscribers opt in, which means they provide minimal personal information in order to receive the newsletter.  Each new subscriber becomes another lead.  The result over time is a large mailing list of qualified prospects.  In addition to the newsletter, business owners email announcements of new products or services to this custom-made pool of potential buyers.

But you’re a musician or doing something involving the music business, right?  If you have music you can give away, that may be even more powerful to get people to sign up for your mailing list. 

Read the rest of Dave’s post here. 

In my opinion, giving away music is no longer important. As quite a few musicians are now giving away their tracks, you need to step up a level if you’re going to stand out from the crowd.

Dave goes on to talk about giving free membership to an area of your site where you will regularly provide free stuff - be it private blog posts, private articles, private gigs and more tracks for download.

The key is to provide free stuff not just once, but on a regular basis, be it fortnightly or monthly. This is so you continue to build a relationship and trust with your fans so they’ll purchase your music.

To summarize, here’s Dave’s final paragraph:

But as I said above– just give away a music download.  It’s more or less free for you to do that, so don’t get caught up with what you’re “losing.”  Think about what you’re gaining by getting more people on your mailing list and more people signed up to your online community. 

Popularity: 8% [?]