As an independent artist, you know how hard it is to get your music out there. Even if you're on another online service, how many people are willing to pay to take a chance on your music? How much are you making from your music online now?

Links to articles about the future of music. Things you should read!
The Music Wars from 30,000 feet: Meet Chris Castle 'Don't expect another Bob Dylan' By Andrew Orlowski
2008: The Year of Free by Mark Mulligan
Chopping the Long Tail down to size By Andrew Orlowski
The LongTail questioned - The Register says it's all bunk. I say they are wrong. by Gerd Leonhard

We believe that most of this generation thinks music is free anyway, so why not give it to them if you can still make money? And spreading your music is the single quickest way to get noticed, resulting in more and better paying gigs, more merchandise sales and more income.

So we've gone to advertisiers and asked them to pay your way. Here's how it works:

We sell audio ads that are attached to the beginning of your song as they download. The ads are easily removed, even my kids can do it. But they have to listen to the ad twice to trim it. So the advertisers pay us a fee for these ads. We then take all of the generated income in a month, and put 80% of it in a pool. We then divide that pool by the total number of downloads, giving us a per download rate. You're then paid at that rate for each of your downloads.

For instance, let's say we had $1000 in income. At 80%, the pool is $800. Let's say we did 5000 downloads. The per download rate is then $0.16. If you had 200 of those downloads you would make $32.00 that month. Sixteen cents may not seem like a lot per song, but if you signed with a major record label your take on a song would probably be less than ten cents.(statutory mechanical royalties are currently 9.1 cents)

There are no upfront fees, no charges ever to you.

To get started, you would need to sign our online distribution agreement, send us mp3 versions of your music, and provide us with some graphics to represent you on the website. We'd also like to use paypal to pay you, so we'd need that info once the agreement has been signed.

Thanks for your continued support of the independent artists at TreeTunes and remember:

The Music Matters!