First of all a late happy new year to all of you.

At the end of each year its time to reflect what you’ve done and what can be improved in the future. And musicly there where two things that I need some advice about.

First one is about all those websites on the net where people can upload/promote/share there music. Offcourse ccM is a great site but I also create without the use of other peoples samples.
What I’m looking for is a page what I could use as some kind off business card and a place where I can let people know what I’m doing wright now.
The option’s are many: myspace, youtube, soundcloud, soundclick (one I’ve used in the past), blogs etc. There are so many it’s hard to choose. Especially if you are like me unknown to the diffrence between them and how to maximize the use of them

So what do you use and why. I would love to hear your pro’s and con’s about all the diffrent sites (please name any other site I mentioned if it’s worth it). Or if it’s out there a good comperrison site.



The second one is about a tip I recently got from a colleague about my music. She said that some of my more soundscape/film music would be perfect for games. I know that the netherlands are one of the better game producing nations, so that should be interesting for me.
Now I’m proberbly the only 26 year old that doesn’t play computer games (apart from a game of pro evo every now then) so I haven’t got a clue about what’s going on in that industry. I also have no idea what would be a smart way to approach them.

So maybe some you have could give me some tips about wich production studio’s would be interesting to go to (proberbly some of the smaller ones) and how to do that.

Thanks a lot AA

Happy new year! (Am I still allowed to say that on the 12th?)

I promote myself for professional computer geekery and here’s what I do: I bought a domain for about $20 (a .ca because I’m in Canada) and host a professional resume on the domain and a little blog on a subdomain for about $3.50/month. The advantage of this is that I was also able to set up a password protected area for customers to download any projects I do for them and having firstname@lastname.ca as an email address looks really good on paper.

From there, advertising your site is the next big issue. What I do is post in forums that are directly related to what I do for a living and put a link to my site in my signature. I also try to contribute positively to those communities to develop a good name for myself.

Last and certainly not least, don’t underestimate the power of a cold call. Sit down with some friends and come up with a way to sell yourself in 30 seconds or less. Make sure you’re able to tell them exactly what you can do and why they want _you_ to do it. Then, pick up the phone and call; make sure to mention your website if they’re interested in seeing/hearing some of your work, thank them for their time and call back a few days later (three to five) to see what they thought. You might not hear back from everyone you call but you certainly won’t hear from the ones you don’t contact.

If I read the fact that you’re in NL correctly… stroopwafels make an excellent display of gratitude to a random stranger on the Internet. =p

I’d take a look into open source game development. “Open source” is a generic term referring to the programming equivalent of Creative Commons. So people produce free open source video games for fun or to get their name out there… and many of those game developers will want some music even though they likely don’t have a musician on the team.

Many of them probably know about ccM as a place to get free music, but it might not hurt to approach them and save them the trouble of having to find you. I’d suggest doing a search for “open source game development” and try to find some community websites and make some forum posts there advertising yourself and your music.

Hey,
Sorry I am responding 2 months later but I was browsing the forum and checking on my post that dont seem to get answered, but thats besides the point. :)
I wanted to share with you the site that I use, its pretty popular. www.broadjam.com
They have a free membership to upload a few songs,videos,album,and pics. But if you really want to use it to its fullest capabilities you can pay for the primo membeship. With this you get like 280 song uploads, a bunch of video uploads, pictures, and I think like 20 full album uploads. The other good thing about the primo membership is they will host your own personal website for you. All you need to do is register a domain name with godaddy for like $2-$5 and you get a website. heres mine www.sollopez.com The other reason I think you might like it is becasue they are primarily a licencing website, which means they post oppertunities for artist to submit to certain licencing gigs. Granted you have to pay to submit to them (5$ for primo) but I have goten some pretty cool gigs out of it, like music on reality tv shows.. So anyway, it is kind of expensive for a year of primo its $200. At first I wasn’t sure it was for me but after I started getting licensing gigs I signed up for 2 more years in advance. Anyway, just thought I would share. At least check it out…


Sol

Hi there! I heard some good things about Soundcloud and uploaded a number of tracks. While I don’t expect to get overwhelmed with fan mail, I was surprised that none of those uploads has produced a response at all. I did, however, receive several emails from Soundcloud users advising me to pay cash money in order promote myself more effectively. I didn’t take this advice, so probably shouldn’t complain about not getting a response.

I know that www.dance-industries.com has only cc licenced music and as far as i can remember an separate search tag in the machine to search for game music. Chris and Davey, the two reviewers for the music, have also a lot of tips to improve music and contacts in the commercial music industry. Maybe it is worth a try to load up a track there once to see what your experience with that will be. There is a great music variety on the site but most of the stuff is electronic and along with your upload you can see how much people downloaded and listened to your tracks togheter with a site rating and a rating for the people who listen te music.

greetz PB

ps im from holland too, so if i see or hear anything that can help you i will contact you via email