You already know the advantages that the internet has to offer musicians, you wouldn’t be reading this site if you weren’t interested in exploiting them. You’re still unconvinced? Digital distribution, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways:

Your music reaches a bigger audience than ever before, more people than have ever been into Tower Records, HMV and Virgin Megastores combined have access to your music without either of you leaving home.

More than this, digital distribution costs nothing when compared to physical – you don’t need to press CD’s or LP’s, you don’t need to package them, warehouse them, ship them, you don’t need to take returns or manage stock, you can just put one copy of a track up with a digital distributor and have infinite copies of your music literally anywhere there’s a phone line.

Of course, there are many more ways for people to copy your music without paying for it on the web, but since the cost of getting your music out there is so much less, and a greater proportion of the profits goes to the artist having cut out so much of the bulky record company structure, you’ll probably end up making more money anyhow.You certainly keep a bigger proportion of the revenue from the sales you do make.

The truth is that the internet is inescapable as a medium for music; you just can’t afford to ignore it. Even if you think the internet lays your music too open to piracy, and stick with just releasing CD’s or vinyl, chances are some one of your dedicated fans will encode their copy and put it up on a torrent site anyway, so you might as well give people the option of buying it legally online…