Author's product rating: 
| Advantages: |
Fast, Free, Easy to use |
| Disadvantages: |
n/a |
| Recommend to potential buyers: |
yes |
Soundclick.com is very similar to MP3.com, in the fact that artists can upload their mp3’s for others to download or stream.
On the home page you are offered the different music genres, such as acoustic/folk, alternative, electronica/dance, pop, rock etc all with their own sub genres. So you can get to the style of music you want straight away.
Just below this is the two top 25 charts, one for unsigned bands the other for signed, with each entry as a hot link to get straight to the artist.
Now if you are not an artist, then this is still the place for you if you want quality MP3 downloads, for FREE. With a lot of artists having FREE downloads on their band pages.
So if you are an artist this is where the fun begins.
On the main page there is the option “New Artists Sign-Up”, so that’s where you go. Signing up is free and easy, you will be asked for your band name and other information such as the style of your music, you are also taken to an interview style page, where you can fill in information all about yourself for use on your artist page.
Once signed up, you use your “Band Administration” page to do your entire uploading etc. This page has so many options it’s far to big to name them here, suffice to say, you can create your message boards, edit your uploads, check you stats, promote your tracks and loads more.
Uploading your MP3
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Uploading an MP3 is a breeze, upon selecting the upload option and entering your information you are given two choices, you can either upload your MP3 from your PC, a progress bar is displayed while uploading to let you know how long it will take, or you can use the “Slurp” option.
The “Slurp” option is great if you’ve got your track elsewhere on the Internet, such as MP3.com, as this will transfer your MP3 from the MP3.com server direct to the Soundclick.com server.
As an example: One of my tracks runs at 8:01 (7.7MB) and with a normal 56K connection took around 62mins to upload onto MP3.com.
Using “Slurp” the same track taken from MP3.com took around 50secs to transfer from one to the other.
I must point out that if you wish to use this option your tracks MUST be free downloads on the other sites to get the full address needed to “Slurp” you must hover over the hot link and select “Copy Shortcut”, which is needed by Soundclick.com.
Your tracks can take up to 24 hours to go live on your band page, but I found that most of mine were up and running within a couple of hours.
What’s the speed?
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Soundclick.com is far faster that MP3.com, uploading is quicker, finding an artist through the on site search goes straight to it and even typing in your own band page address comes up a lot quicker that MP3.com.
Not having broadband (at the moment) then I can’t honestly say what the uploading speed is like, but as soon as I find out, I will update this OP.
Is there anything to Pay at all?
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Now this all depends on you, Soundclick.com is free, if you wish to upgraded to VIP status, you will have to pay, so let’s get onto the services:
Monthly Services
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Service 1: e-commerce, allows you to sell your CDs through Soundclick, this will cost you $4.95 (£3.08)
Service 2 - front-page rotation as "featured band", charts highlight $4.95 (£3.08)
Service 3 - VIP Band: custom pages, ad-free, deep-linking... $9.95 (£6.19)
Discount: get 50% off all promotional services below when you sign up for service 3 (VIP account)
Promo Services
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Promo song of the day - 24 hours exclusive genre headliner - our most cost-effective tool
Exclusive 24h FrontPage - claim the exclusive FrontPage flash
Banner ads - get your own customized Flash ad in 30 seconds
Track your ad campaign online.
Selling your music
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This is where Soundclick.com is far better than MP3.com; on MP3.com you get 50-60% of your sales, where as with Soundclick.com you get 100%.
As soon as a sale is made, you are informed and you send out the CD’s yourself, now some may argue that, you have to do all the print work, burn the CDs yourself, but with a lot of companies doing short run duplicating, such as “dbmasters”, then this shouldn’t be too much of a problem.
But then again MP3.com do the production for you and you just sit back and leave them to it, but at the end of the day it’s whatever you, yourself, are happy with.
Now, whatever you make from your sales is paid direct to your PayPal account weekly, no matter how small the amount is you’ll get paid.
You can add up to 5 products, the shipping and handling is all down to you, but the costs are added to the price of your CD: $3.00 (£1.87) within Europe and $6.00 (£3.73) outside Europe.
For example:
CD sales: Say you sell your CD for $8 (£4.98) through SoundClick. When a customer from United Kingdom buys this CD, he/she pays the
· $8 (£4.98) for your CD plus
· $3 (£1.87) shipping and handling costs
· $0.50 (£0.31) credit card processing.
The credit card is checked immediately online and your account is credited the full $11 (£6.85) ($8 (£4.98) + $3 (£1.87)).
Overall
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From the time that I’ve been using Soundclick.com, it’s been smooth sailing, uploading is easy, editing your sites information is simple and the process of generally working on your site is a pleasure, there is no hanging about waiting for pages to load and the majority of the tracks available by fellow artists are superb.
So, whether you’re after some superb MP3 downloads or your looking for somewhere new to promote/sell your work, then this is the place to visit.
Thanks for reading…
Karen 2003
