Sites to upload your mp3s to

Back in the day there wasn't so many sites where you could register as an artist and upload mp3s. I started out using mp3.com when it was the most popular thing, and when they deleted everything and tried to start making money I moved on to IUMA.com, but that died a couple of years later. Now I've completed my first tracks in years, and there's dozens of sites to choose from. I'm gonna list the ones I've tried with a few comments so we can sort the good from the bad.

mp3.com.au: (edit: this site is all but dead now, uploading doesn't work) Highly recommended! Long-running site which underwent a major interface overhaul a year or two ago. It's not just for Australian artists, anyone around the world can sign up. This is easily the best site I've found. There's lots of listeners, I got more listens than on Last.fm (and that's including friends who scrobbled my track). Users and artists can subscribe to updates for a particular artist, and people often reciprocate the subscription, which creates a bit of a network for the artists. The site has weekly charts for each sub-genre, and thanks to the listeners it seems just about every new track uploaded makes an appearance in the top 10 of a particular chart. Users can also create playlists and add your tracks, which is really cool. I was lucky enough to have someone add my track to a playlist, and listening to the playlist was a quick way for me to discover other interesting artists on the site.

MySpace: Ugly site, but it seems that just about every artist is on it, big or small. It's like the dictionary of bands these days, so if you're not on there, you might as well not exist. I got a decent amount of listens here too, although it's probably counting people who visit the page for 10 seconds and browse off again. I haven't customized my page design at all yet, but if I do, it will be something subtle, not something nauseating and impossible to read like the majority of profiles!

Newgrounds: Okay, this is something a little different. Newgrounds is a long-running site which has an 'Audio Portal'. It's not really orientated towards bands. Rather, it's orientated more towards audio that is created for use in Flash movies and games. So it's more suited towards video game music and shorter clips that are intended to be looped. Music in the electronica and industrial genres will probably slot in here nicely. If you can imagine your music being picked by someone as an accompaniment to their animated cartoon, Newgrounds might be for you.

Facebook: Not a good way to promote music, but it's a popular site so it is a good way to keep in touch with existing fans. Here's my page for an example. Pages can also be created for political leaders, websites, and just about anything people can be a fan/supporter of. I had to scan in photo identification to prove I am who I said I was before I could upload music, but that process was painless.

Jamendo: Looks alright, tags are interesting, but it's album-orientated so I can't really use it yet.

Muzic.net.nz and Amplifier.co.nz: Two sites for New Zealand artists only. It's good to be signed up to local sites just to be a piece of your country or state's music puzzle, even if there's nothing else special about the site.


Other sites I've tried that are probably not worthwhile:

mp3.com: Site which cleared their database and reinvented themselves so they could actually make money. I doubt there's many listeners on here these days. Couldn't sign up last month due to a bug, so only managed to create my artist profile this week. It didn't take long for it to be approved.

DMusic: Rather boring site, got a few listens here though. Interface is awkward at times.

GarageBand: Really quiet here, only nice thing seems to be that it forwards uploaded songs to ilike.com.

SoundClick: Long-running site which seems to suffer from bugs every other time I try to use it. Charts are possibly the only interesting thing about it.

PureVolume: Another really quiet site, apparently didn't get any listens here.


...And there's a whole lot more similar sites out there. Are there any good ones which I've missed?

Interesting. I'd never really looked at Archive.org, except for their web archive. It looks like a good place to put albums, but I don't think you can call it a "backup". A backup would be the audio program project files, or at least uncompressed audio files, and you probably wouldn't want to upload those to the site.

www.fuzz.com is quite nice, good layout and people are nice

heres another site someone mentioned no idea what its like..

http://www.deezer.com/

Thanks I agree with the archive site being great I have 3 of my albums on there too, using the warez file distribution system like rapidshare has some appeal too :)

Thanks for these views on different sites. I'm liking Reverbnation too at the moment after being on the site for quite a while without doing much with it. It's very well set up with tools for artist promotion, great widgets for placement elsewhere and nice looking page.

Soundclick is another one that's looking good as time goes by, especially there seems to be good possibilities with the forums (if you can find them, lol, it is a bit technically long winded sometimes, but that's not a big deal after a while).

I keep wanting to spend more time at Jamendo. Like the Internet Archive you upload in .wav and it gets converted to 192+ mp3. One click download of albums in zip format makes it a great site to link to as well. There are lots of great artists there and a passionate pool of listeners too if you can get past some of the technical challenges.

The options are .wav, .aiff, and .flac

I just revisited Newgrounds and discovered their audio portal now has a Flash visualization program. It's worth uploading your songs there just to see them visualized by an angry face or dancing badgers!

I like this place, you can do this.
Helen Hoover Boyle Prt.II

another victim of the credit crunch squeeze maybe?

Just an update, sort of regarding the Internet Archive - I have uploaded a recording of an interview that I did at WCUW - a small radio community station.

http://www.archive.org/details/under_the_influence_interview

MP3.com is another site owned by CBS, so it's going to start redirecting artists to Last.fm: http://www.last.fm/forum/23/_/518130

I'm loving Bandcamp too - all traffic must come from you but it's a great place to use as your own main music website in lots of ways. It took me days to upload three albums because everything must go up in wav format - that's great though because after you've done that you are able to offer the music in a wide array of formats. Well thought out and operated site it seems...