megaphoneEveryone seems to be agreeing that the way to get yourself noticed online is to give away a taster of your music, then give fans the opportunity to buy the rest of your catalogue, t-shirts, tickets and whatever else you can offer on the back of the free sample.

If you want to take this advice, here are a few places you might consider setting up a playlist including some of your music; just make sure you’ve got links back to your own website, or to your music on iTunes (after we’ve down your digital music distribution, obviously).

http://www.youtube.com/my_playlists – Set up a list including your video that you can embed into your own website, facebook or myspace.

http://mixtape.me/ – Free streaming site where you can upload your own tracks and mash up other peoples – make sure you put your info and gig dates in the liner notes for your playlist

http://sharemyplaylists.com/ – Spotify’s dedicated playlist hosting site. In it’s infancy, but a nice way of getting people to your music really easily (especially if we’ve already got your music online with them).

http://8tracks.com/ – A hosting and discovery site for short playlists (at least 1/2 an hour of music)

then of course there’s always iTunes – putting up podcasts is a little tricky if you’re not using a mac, but here’s the guide page on how to produce your own podcasts

http://www.apple.com/itunes/podcasts/specs.html – with the added bonus that you can link people straight to your content on itunes (also click here to use our itunes linkmaker for other sites).