Composing : Where And How Much Music To Park by Joel Irwin

With the recent post for a fellow composer whose music is on a personal/publisher website, it got me thinking about two questions: 1. Where should composers showcase their music 2. How much music should be showcased Question 1: Where Where to put your music is often a function of why you want to put it there. For example, if your goal is to sell your music, there are various web sites which do that - for example my friend Barry Coffing is a music supervisor whose site, aptly named musicsupervisor.com has music that studios, films, etc. can search for and easily lisence. I have some of my music there (though nothing has yet to be licensed). Another site where music gets placed on the 'lower end' (used often for wedding videos) is songfreedom.com. There are other sites like this. Sometimes it costs to park your music at these sites, other times not. The object is that of a marketplace of buyers and sellers. This is not where you park to get it heard by the general public. Then there are collaboration sites - places where you park your music to get heard by your peers and collaborators. About 10 years ago there was a famous music collaboration site called, tonos.com. I found some of my lyricists there and we have collaborated then and still do. After Tonos shut down, many moved on to soundclick.com. In this site and others that followed it, there were charts in various genres and either you and/or your songs/compositions were ranked based on the number of listens. Even our own site here can be considered a collaboration site for music though I rarely get anyone to listen (or watch) my audio/video files (I have 15 and all but two have under 10 watches/listens). Then there are music listening sites that come in all shapes and forms - too many to mention here. In my mind (as I am not a rock band or a pop/country artist) there are the sites where those that listen are mainly people I refer to or are people who are in the music business like me (i.e., peer listening) - these could be a personal web site or more likely would be reverbnation.com or soundcloud.com (both have a limited amount of free space and then you have to pay for more space or services). I have been on reverbnation for quite a long time and never seemed to get a lot of listens without a lot of extra work or money and so I have parked my works on icompositions.com which is much less well known but a lot more international even though most of my music is film, classical, or jazz, As soon as I put anything out, without even publicizing it, I will have 50 listens in less than an hour - sometimes more. I average about 80 to 100 listens a week when not posting anything and just past 40,000 listens for all my works. No other site I have parked my music gets me that many listens for free. Again, there are too many listening sites to mention - these are just a few. And then there are the really public sites which while designed for video probably have more audio than anywhere else in the world - youtube and vimeo. We are all well aware that music is quite often put out without video (or technically we put out an audio track with a still image for video). I will put my live performances on youtube as well as some of the shorts. I don't put music out there without actual video - but that is just a personal preference. By the way, I do have a personal/professional web site, but I don't put finished music there - only works in progress for various reasons. Question 2: How Much Do you put out your whole work or just a clip. Well if you were trying to sell your music, you may want to put it soley on for sales sites like iTunes or CDBaby (or Amazon, etc.). But many of us composers are not selling soundtracks, we either are trying to interest film makers in our music or just want to give people an opportunity to hear our works. So then do they get to hear it all or do you just give them part to listen? There are arguments and preferences that go both ways. Many of the sites give the ability to stream your music without being able to download it (like icompositions) or you can stream music from a personal/publisher web site with a player that does not allow downloading. While there is software that can trap streaming music and create an MP3, most listeners don't know anything about that type of software. What is more well known, unfortunately, are the dozens (perhaps more) of software that can download video or audio from youtube. When I first started composing, I was, like most who start off, fearful of two things: (1) I would compose music inadvertently infringing on someone else's copyright and (2) if I gave out demo CDs or put my music online, it would get stolen. As I progressed in my career, that fear subsided. Perhaps someday when I get 'rich and famous', I may need to rethink it but I am in the part of my career where getting 'heard' is significantly more important than those initial fears. So for me - I much rather people hear the whole thing than just parts.