Should New Artists Give Away Their Mixtape For Free?

There are many artists who try to promote their mixtape by giving it away for free.

The majority of new rap artists will make a mixtape and upload it to a third party music hosting website such as www.datpiff.com, www.soundcloud.com, or www.livemixtapes.com.

Some artist will even go to a music event and hand out their mixtapes to people leaving the venue.

Even though these are good forms of promoting yourself as well as your music, they’re not the most effective way. When promoting yourself you always want to use the most effective promotional methods.

You want to use methods that you can reap the most benefits from, and put you at a great advantage over your competition. In my previous article I explained 5 Elements That Make A Good Mixtape and I also mentioned one of the most POWERFUL ways that you can Sell Thousands of Your Mixtape.

In this short article I’m going to explain why you should think twice about giving away your music for free, and instead exchange your mixtape for people’s contact information.

Uploading your mixtape to a third party website so people can download it for free is a good form of promotion but it doesn’t allow you to reap the benefits of that transaction.

You might get a lot of views and a few people may even listen to your mixtape, but the most important element that’s missing is that you have no way to follow up with the prospects that downloaded your music.

I have been in the music industry for many years now and one thing I’ve learned is that as an artist you shouldn’t think that people who download your mixtape will become an instant fan of yours, and start buying your music.

That rarely happens. In order for you to ensure that people keep you and your music in mind you have to make the effort to collect their contact information.

You will do this by creating your own Artist Website and setting up an auto-responder optin form. If you don’t want to own your own artist website (Which is a horrible idea not to have one) don’t worry you can always build your emailing list by using optin forms from music hosting sites such as Reverbnation.com.

If you are planning to have your own artist website you can use email subscription forms from these companies:

www.aweber.com www.canstantcontact.com www.mailchimp.com www.madmimi.com

This opt-in form collects their name and email address, that way you can follow up with your prospect an update them on new events surrounding your music career.

You can inform them on when and where you’re doing performances, or even notify them when you’re dropping a new mixtape or LP.

Keep in mind that it’s unprofessional to bombard your prospect with spam email. So don’t email the individuals on your list to frequent or they will get annoyed and unsubscribe to your mailing list.

The great thing about having people opt-in or subscribe to be on your mailing list is that you can really weed out who your true fans are, from the individuals who were just browsing your music with no intention of becoming a fan.

This is the most effective way to build a solid fan list, and it’s up to you to learn how to turn these fans into long life customers.