We’re still not sure why you’d want to pursue this.

Two different musicians asked me recently if a couple thousand dollars was a reasonable quote for a basic web site. I said “Absolutely” and then immediately added “but don’t do it”. Interestingly, both were asking for my expertise (I do have a little) but neither were asking me to do the work. Musicians are cheap bastards. I should know, I’m a recovering musician. So why did I tell them not to bother? Because almost everything you would want a web site to do for your band – streaming music, streaming video, user interaction, downloads, etc – is available as a free service elsewhere, with widgets that you can easily embed not only in a very simple site of your own, but in the billions of pages that are the Internet as well. Ask yourself the rather silly (but oft-overlooked) question: Do I want to spend a bunch of money building a destination site of my own and stuggling with SEO to get people to see it, or do I want my music on my site, several other massively trafficked music sites, and thousands of Facebook, Friendfeed, and other Social Networking pages? So the great thing is that whereas this wasn’t really possible even a year ago, there are a slew of sites now that make this absurdly simple. The embedded player from SoundCloud that’s featured below took about five minutes from account setup to embedding to create. For the record, it’s some soundtrackish dreck I did a few years ago for a benefit CD for Kenya-based Amara Conservation. But we’re not showcasing the music, we’re showcasing SoundCloud. They’re just one player in an emerging scene that is sort of like “YouTube” for audio. Below are some of the other key players.

Bandcamp lets you utilize your own page design, with URL’s like YourBandName.bandcamp.com. You control the pricing from free to user-selected. Also offers sharing and embedding tools, visitor stats, metadata editing, and fast downloads.

Last month Wired said SoundCloud “Threatens MySpace as Music Destination for Twitter Era”. Soundcloud doesn’t focus on building a comprehensive set of services, they focus on doing one very well, and very simply: sharing, embedding, and streaming music.

TopSpin offers all of the features mentioned above, but is aimed at the professional working artist. If you already have physical media, a fan base, some social networking set up, and meet all of their other criteria, TopSpin is a site to keep an eye on.

You may or may not have followed Muxtape’s meteoric rise and takedown,  but in any case, they’re back, and they’re restructuring to offer the same services as sites like TopSpin. As of this writing, you can only join if invited by another band, but this is supposed to change.

Tunecore doesn’t offer the sharing/embedding features we’re talking about themselves, but they allow you to upload files to get them placed on iTunes, Rhapsody, Amazon MP3, eMusic, Sony Connect, MusicNet and Napster.