"Pay For Your Ticket And Don't Complain."

Until recent times indipendent musicians, unless they have a truckload of cash behind them, have had very limited control over the release of their material. Keen to have their music made available to the widest possible audience they 'climb aboard' the major distributors without giving much thought to alternative options.

iLike 'recommends' to artists to have at least one free download as an incentive for listeners to return. As I have mentioned elsewhere this seems to be a fruitless exercise for the artist.

ReverbNation also employs the same strategy. Not every song by artists on Reverbnation are available on iTunes as the listener may be led to believe. Again, artists are encouraged to make free downloads available as 'fan' incentives. Additionally ReverbNation has a 'band equity' ranking system. This is based on daily song plays, returning visitors, new fans and 'fan interaction.' I find that 'fan interaction' tends to be somewhat overdone by some artists. By sending letters to fans who have joined an artists mailing list the artists ranking seems to be given a substantial boost. This leads to artists sending messages to their mailing list that aren't particularly pertinent, hence people are more inclined to 'opt-out.'

After overlooking the most obvious means of making ones' music visible to as wide an audience as possible I have recently released the album "Bullet" via Nimbit. This allows the artist the freedom to release material on the exact day that they wish to and have the ability to set what they think is a fair price.

Nimbit charges 20% for this freedom. They have a free account, which I am using, and two paid accounts which offer CD replication, merchandise, e-tickets and so forth.

I have placed my Nimbit store on my website, the "Bob Findlay Music Page" on Facebook (a new collaboration), MySpace and below. Each store has a tracking code for sales (if there are any) which enables artists to view where most sales are coming from and (hopefully) correlate 'why.'

The upcoming weeks/months I shall be following each store with interest. Hopefully a few other folks might be as well.