Publishing (free) Music On the Web

If you're an independent musician tossing out your music for free, because you'd rather have thousands hear what you do than sell a few hundred CDs, you don't want to spend a fortune on web hosting.

So you check on eBay for a cheap web hosting deal and get "4 years of unlimited webhosting" for 10 bucks.

The problem with those deals is that once you start getting traffic around 20GB a month they start wishing they wore diapers, and will soon flunk out on you. The "4 years" you bought will maximally last 350 days. In my experience.

So you look around for alternatives. Instead of having to upload your stuff to a different cheap host every couple of months, why not go for free file hosting?

Here's the pros and cons I've found with different file hosting services:

Most reliable so far: Mediafire

Pros:
* unlimited web space & traffic.
* Fairly reliable (so far).
* Only need email address to register (not like some who want to know everything about you...).
* Some download stats
* The files can be neatly organized in folders, sorted by name (not last upload, which can be annoying with services like Scribd... another future topic)
* Picture gallery

Cons:
* 100 MB size limit (per file) for free account users,
* no hot-linking (the download link takes you to their web site where you'll have to bear with a bit of advertisement


Last.FM (formerly the music section of Download.com)

Pros:
* Neat player features & nice overview of the material (albums),
* hotlinking possible

Cons:
* no download stats : (
* One big drawback of Last.fm is that they not only make it virtually impossible to upload pictures of your artist, but they even remove existing ones, which doesn't exactly enhance the appearance of your artist's page...
* While they encourage you to upload "the more music the better," they will refuse entire albums, especially when not in English

All in all, its predecessor, Music.Download.com was less fancy, but had some big advantages over Last.fm


Reverbnation:

Pros:
*Cool player and widget options,
* some play stats,
* local bands charts

Cons:
* no download stats


Then there is Cycast, a web platform where artists can host music files and videos, which used to create some promising traffic in its beginning stages which then usually dwindles down to a trickle after a while, due to its growth, similar to Youtube or Tangle (Godtube).
The audio player widget is quite neat. Only setback with all players generated by Cycast: one cannot turn off the autoplay, which means, if you embed a video or song from Cycast anywhere, it goes off as soon as you open the site and won't stop until the visitor finds the invisible pause button...
Having its seat in the land of Darwin, the Cycast community isn't very open to spiritual, or rather, Christian views expressed by artists and is accordingly generous with negative ratings if one insists...
All in all, a reliable service with a few drawbacks...
Cycast's advantage over platforms like Last.FM and Reverbnation is that it tells you how many times each of your audio files have been downloaded. However, the general setup doesn't invite to upload entire albums...

There are similar platforms to Cycast, none of which have ever really taken off, though.


Totally unreliable: Boxstr.

As an alternative I tried Boxstr., only to find out that most of the time I spent uploading my files there were wasted. The files may show up on your account, but you won't be able to access them. After a few weeks, links that used to work will peter out, too. Basically a waste of time, although it has some promising options like hotlinking and player features, which all would be nice, IF it would work reliably.


Rapidshare:
Though I haven't used Rapidshare to host my own files yet, because of the annoying 30 seconds wait that I don't want to subject my listeners to, it's fairly reliable to find source, has been around, tried and proven, and generates better traffic than services like Mediafire (with which you're basically responsible to create your own traffic by putting the links on your sites).
Maybe I'll use it in the future, just for fun...

File Factory:
Not really interesting, since they also have the 30 seconds wait policy. Then I'd rather go to Rapidshare...

There are other services, such as Garageband, and of course MySpace, but I haven't had any experiences with those that would have knocked my socks of. In fact, when it comes to MySpace, I have said it before, and I can only say it again and again: MySpace, in my perhaps not totally as humble opinion as it should be - totally sucks!