January 7, 2011

DIY Corner: Create a Free Digital Promo using Soundcloud, Google Docs and Blogger

If you are thinking of ditching the expensive and often wasteful activity of posting out physical promos copies, and fancy moving across to a digital promo platform, you could do worse than create your own DIY digital promo system.

You can create a pretty effective system using a combination of SoundCloud, Google Docs, Blogger. and Dropbox.  All these services provide free accounts with enough functionality for your purposes. In fact, those nice SoundCloud people are offering discounts on SoundCloud Pro Accounts to Kudos Distributed Labels. You will find the discount code on our label portal (where you get your statements, and complete your metadata)  in the updates section.  Google Docs and Blogger requires a Google Account (if you use Gmail, you already have one of these).  A 2GB dropbox account is free.

1/ Create a Set for your release in SoundCloud.  SoundCloud is very intuitive to use.  Upload your audio (MP3s are fine, SoundCloud can handle most formats).   Complete the details for each track, and upload the cover art.  Before you finish, navigate to your favourite pre-order supporting download store (7 digital works pretty well, as does Juno and Play.com) and provided you have completed your metadata on our digital portal in good time (a couple of weeks earlier), you should be able to find the pre-order link for your release.  Copy this link and paste it into the “buy this set” link.  You can always add this later if the link isn’t available yet.

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