ATTN ONLINE ARTISTS: MAKE SOME MONEY WITH YOUR MUSIC
Greetings, my collegues Online Artists! Sure, it's not as much as the old days with MP3.com. However, it might be a start to a better situation for the Online Artist Community, of whatever style you may like to be recognized in. A few days ago I got an e-mail by that same ole MP3.com in which they stated they were going to team up with LAST.FM.
I've heard of that site before, but never bothered to really pay any attention. What drove my attention, though, is the words "Royalty Payback Program". That gave me a vibe of the good old days, and after checking the site out a little bit, I could do nothing but conclude that this was a very positive thing what I saw.
LAST.FM has indeed created the opportunity for artists to upload their music and receive royalties. This is how it works: You get $0.01 per 20 listens to one or more of the tunes you've uploaded. You will not get paid for previews, also not for full-length previews, and you will not get royalties for any free downloads you might want to offer. In fact, you will only get royalties for full-length streams from listeners located in Germany, the UK and the USA.
I will be the first to admit that it is really not that much money, but on the other hand, as far as I know this is the only possibility for us to make a little bit of money as Online Artist.
I don't really know much more than what I wrote above, other than that LAST.FM is a very well-visited website. There was already a Messian Dread page onthere, which I (as far as I remember) not made myself, but it was pretty easy to "claim the name" and I am only humbled to know that people actually like my music so much that they created a page there.
At this moment, I am uploading my music to the website. It will probably take me a couple of weeks before all of that is finished. I will also remove most of my music from the other OMD sites, like Soundclick et cetera, in the coming weeks. The only free downloads of my music will be through the Dubroom Website and Archive.org, which I use to upload the tunes so I can deep-link to them through the Dubroom.
LAST.FM hopefully will be a better place for the serious Online Artists, and I think that this royalty program is a clear indication for that. Hopefully, the royalty program will extend to other countries as well as downloads.
