With the recent Myspace Music relaunch, a pivotal question has been posed to indie musicians: what kind of distribution is right for me? As an indie artist and label owner, having your music online is pivotal to any band’s success. You can reach a global audience and increase fanbase size by creating mailing lists and article submissions to multiple directories.

Many musician friends of mine were happy to see Myspace get a shot in the arm so to speak by bringing attention back to their network. They wanted to be part of this distribution launch and signed up for Snocap and asked me if it was a good move.

Snocap allows you to set up a store instantly and sell your music on your profile page. The key thing here is that the service is Free, however, Snocap makes their share of profit. According to Snocap’s FAQ page: “SNOCAP charges a transaction fee of $.39 per download that includes all the costs of providing the SNOCAP MyStore: the bandwidth, storage, audio fingerprint license, PayPal and payment management costs, customer service, etc.” In my eyes it is a pretty steep cut. You are forced to raise your prices on a single or album just to recoup the cost of setup.

Songcast offers 100% royalties and places your music with major online retailers such as iTunes, Amazon, Rhapsody and Napster. This is critical for our operation. We used to have our major releases just on our own website and you have to work on getting fans to find your store.

Songcast charges $5.99 a month for unlimited album upload. You will be spending some money here but your fans can feel more secure spending their money on a trusted storefront and it helps add some credibility to your operation. That is the tradeoff I was looking for. We have sold more albums because we were on iTunes than when we were selling off of our own site. Food for thought.

With selling music online their is always going to be some cost, you just have to place yourself in a position that can reap you the most profits with the least cost.

Myspace is key to marketing my music and new releases to my fans. You have the opportunity to add friends and potential customers from all over the world to your friends list and network. Snocap provides you as an artist a great way to market your band and make money at the same time.

Snocap makes your Myspace page into a virtual store front to sell new music. Snocap is essentially a great tool if you don’t have any distribution and even better if you do have distribution. I currently have distribution through Songcast for one project but I can use Snocap to market newer singles, set my own price and put them for sale on my band page. Try different techniques to sell your music and see what works.

This is non exclusive and as their ad states “It’s your music. You own it.” The beauty of this is that your basic Snocap Artist Account is FREE and so is a Myspace Music page. You have a virtual store to market for free at a click of a button.