Easiest way to put album online for free download?

Denalihighway

Hi folks.
So my band will have an album in a couple of months. We want to give it away online as a download. Not to go into it too much but the big problem we have it that with most online ditributors there is always a minimum download price - 99c for apple etc, and this in our opinion is too expensive for a new band like us who just wants people to have our music. There's very little scope to reduce the price, there's a couple of places where you can forgo your cut and reduce it to about 70c but still its too expensive I feel. To set up our own standalone payment facility would be too much hassle and anyways we dont want to do it as we dont want to charge for it.

I'm looking for suggestions from those of you who are a little bit (a lot) more technical minded than me and may have seen or heard of some interesting approaches to allowing people download their album for free. I've been mulling over some basic approaches and the pros n cons etc, some of which would include. (nothing very revolutionary here bov but just to indicate what we're thinking..)

- Emailing them to people who contact us (the advatnage being we have their email for our mailing list. But it would take ages to email them the mp3files I assume...
- put them up on myspace at intervals (you can only put up a max of 6 songs at the mo but i'm sure that may change soon or else we might try customising our page or something)
- getting our own website and having the mp3s up there. Probably the best option? We could set it up so that they had to punch in their email before continuing to the download page or something?
- is there any open source stuff that anyone would recommend that would be reasonably customisable for a band webpage? I have mates that could code around it but really the main reason for a webpage would be so people could visit it and download the album
- other???

Thanks for any help

Blowfish

If you just want a site to host it and you'll organise the advertising of it etc. yourself then you could just use Rapidshare.

Denalihighway

cheers. Can't get into that site right now but assuming we pay them annual hosting fee and they provide a template we can upload the mp3s to?

Then we put the widget into our site or myspace or whatever?

Blowfish

Denalihighway wrote: »

cheers. Can't get into that site right now but assuming we pay them annual hosting fee and they provide a template we can upload the mp3s to?

Then we put the widget into our site or myspace or whatever?

No need to pay anything, just upload it to them as a zip, then just stick the link to it on myspace.

Black_Knight

No no no, dont use Rapidshare, use Rapidshare

[size=-2]Check the links, subtle differences, but the link Blowfish gave is a dieing race of file storage.[/size]

Note: When zipping files, dont name it the artist and album title, its too obvious and Rapidshare will remove it from their site! Name it as an abreviation on the album. Eg. Red Hot Chilli peppers - Californication = RHCPC.zip

challengemaster

Stick it on demonoid

Overheal

You can also host it as a Torrent.

mordeith

You could try Carbonlogic. I have some of my stuff up there. Its totally free and very easy to use.

Denalihighway

Black_Knight wrote: »

No no no, dont use Rapidshare, use Rapidshare

[size=-2]Check the links, subtle differences, but the link Blowfish gave is a dieing race of file storage.[/size]

Note: When zipping files, dont name it the artist and album title, its too obvious and Rapidshare will remove it from their site! Name it as an abreviation on the album. Eg. Red Hot Chilli peppers - Californication = RHCPC.zip

why would they remove it? Obv its prohibited for some reason but what's the issue there?