Few priceless free tools for musicians

Sometimes it can get a bit overwhelming for a musician as to what tools and websites to use to promote your music. There are so much out there these days that it can easily turn into a full time job just to keep up with everything. I will pick a few free tools here, which I use and think are valuable to me.

Soundcloud

This has been around for a while now, but still it amazes me to see not all musicians are using it. This is a community where you can interact with other musicians and music lovers. Setting up an account and just letting it stand there, will do you nothing. You get out of it what you put in to it. If you want a quick crash course on Soundcloud, click HERE.

Dropbox

Dropbox is like having your own hard drive online. You get 2GB free. You can set up the Dropbox on your computer and your mobile device. And I used it all the time to transfer pictures, video and audio between the devices as well. Here’s a quick tip: Use Dropbox to import your videos from your phone to your computer. Most phones compress videos if you email or post the directly to YouTube. But Dropbox keeps the original video quality.

Mailchimp

Mailchimp is a great Email mailing list management service, that is free up to your first 2000 followers (that is a lot by the way). Their design templates are great and easy to use. And I personally like the chimp giving you Hi 5, when your campings have been sent. Also it lets you design great signup forms you can embed on your website as well as a page hosted on their site, which address is safe for Twitter direct messages.

Radioairplay.com

Radioairplay.com is basically a paid promotion service, where you can buy play credits and you can target in which channels your songs get played. But if you sign up for the service, you get 100 free credits, and they give you 10 free credits every week that’s 620 plays in your first year, and you don’t need to spend a penny.

WordPress.org

Ok, so if you want to get your own website, but can’t afford to spend a fortune on it. Just register the name with Godaddy and buy some webspace. Most major providers have a one click installation for WordPress, which you can download from WordPress.org for free! Once this is installed you can build and manage your own website and host your own blog! With thousands of free themes, with a little bit of work you’ll get your website looking really nice.
There are hundreds of instructional videos on YouTube as well, if you get stuck.

So there you go, some of my favourite free tools. Let me know what’s yours and what you think of my list.

J.P.

The author J.P. Kallio is a singer songwriter
To get two of his free songs go HERE and click Download