As a recording artist, selling and promotion of your music can be a pain. It’s pretty obvious that physical distribution is merging into the land of Camelot and digital age is upon us. That means that you need to be selling your music on the internet, but how and where? Most popular music stores either ask for a substantial membership fee or they are picky about who they let participate in there campaigns. How does one catch a break? Introducing the Scratch Beats Charts:
THE SCRATCH BEATS CHARTS EXPLAINED
The Scratch Beats Charts(SBC) is what we would like to call, an open source music chart show. It is mainly aimed at unsigned artists recording in home studios who do not have a means of getting there music out there. We are not boxing the SBC charts off to unsigned artists only, signed artists can enter too.
Once you enter a song into the SBC, a sample of approximately 30 seconds is extracted from it and made public whilst the full track is stored in a secure space. You will be supplied with a URL to promote your song, which you should mail to anybody and everybody you know. These people(fans) would click on the link and be redirected to a page containing the public sample of your track. They will be given two options:
1] Purchase the track
2] Vote for the track
You will need to be registered on the site to submit music, but it’s free and quite a simple process.
Sell Your Music
For every track purchased, you earn R5 and for every vote received, you move up in the charts. Every successful purchase of your track adds two bonus votes to your ranking. Votes are tallied up weekly and each person gets 1 vote per song per week(excluding track purchase bonus votes). At the end of the week, a newsletter is released with the chart results where people out of your sphere of influence will see you listed and be promoted to listen and perhaps purchase and vote for your track increasing your income and ranking in the charts.
The Charts Are split Into Genres.
Hip Hop
R&B
Rock
Dance/House
Gospel
More genres will be added as the charts grow.
Payouts
Payouts to artists will happen once a month on condition that you have a balance of at least R500. If you are in South Africa, you will get paid out in Rands, any where else gets paid out in US Dollars according to the exchange rate at the specific time of the payout.
How To Participate
To Enter your song into the SBC simply follow these steps:
1) Visit http://www.facebook.com/l/17802iomhlCBZzpdXK6zKQyCSqg;www.scratchbeats.com
2) Register on http://www.facebook.com/l/17802MGuePHWK1ZqFkRTdTEP6Lw;scratchbeats.com
3) Navigate to the SBC section of the site
4) Fill in the song details: Name, Artists, Genre etc
5) Upload an image and upload you song
6) Start promoting your song using your unique link
Since the Charts have just launched, the first Chart announcement will be released on the first Saturday of December(4/12/2010). That means that all participants who submit their tracks between now and then have a few weeks to promote them.
