The first thing you need to know about selling your music online as an artist is that it’s very slow going for most musicians who try to sell their albums from an official artist’s website. Even gigantic bands playing live music concerts regularly like Metallica and enormously popular pop stars like Jay-Z sell hardly any music from their respective official sites (metallica.com or jay-z.com, perhaps) compared to what they sell from outlets like iTunes and Amazon. This is because selling music online is more than simply making songs available.
Selling music online requires placement on sites who are likely to show up on page 1 of a Google search. This means giant companies like Amazon and iTunes. But how does one get one’s music on iTunes to begin with? The answer is in online music distribution companies. These crews are experts at getting your music from point A to point B, except that point B is actually hundreds of online music stores, rather than just one site (Mondo Tunes boasts more than 750 stores in their distro channels, in fact).