Website 101:
I'm a musician, should I put my music on my website?

We've been asked this a lot over the years. And the answer is, it all depends on your perspective.

It would be crazy for Sting to post all his music as mp3s on his website for free download. If his music was available for free, lots of people who are currently paying for it would stop paying for it.

So if you, as a musician, are selling lots of your work, and lots of people know about you, then it's probably not to your advantage to put lots of your music on your site for free download.

If, however, as a musician you are trying to get more people aware of your music, it might be worth it for you to give some of it away. Hopefully people will find your site, download your music, love it, come to your shows and turn their friends on to you.

It's important to know that any music a user can hear on your website can be kept and eventually burned to a CD. No format is "safe", though it is harder to capture some formats than others.

If you put up mp3 files for download, it won't take much for someone to burn them to a CD. If you put up some type of streaming audio, a user will have to get a little more serious and learn how to capture it before they can burn it to a CD. But it's really not that hard.

So there's no "safe" way to post your music. Consequently if you are certain you don't want anyone to have your music, without buying it, then you ought to just post short samples of it. 30 second to 1 minute audio clips can give a user a good idea of what your music sounds like without providing them with the whole song for free.