How do I get my song listed in the "Recommended Free MP3's" area?
1.) We must like your music. Feel free to email a link to a song you want considered or the actual MP3, or you can send a CD to the address listed at the bottom of this page.
2.) You should put your MP3 out on the Internet at a site that can be "deep-linked". This is the recommended way, but if you don't have the ability to host full-length MP3s, we can host them on our site instead.
3.) The MP3 must be the full song length and should be high quality (128K or higher).
Why would I want to put my music out for free?
1.) Some artists offer a single or few "teaser" songs out for free so that people will want to buy the whole CD.
2.) Some artists don't plan on recouping their production costs on downloads, but depend on live events to fund their recording endeavors.
3.) Some artists offer it as a gift to the body of Christ, subsidizing their ministry through their day jobs.
4.) Artists that put free MP3's on their site get the "Free MP3's" designator and will see increased traffic from HotWorship.
5.) Radio stations and podcasts frequent HotWorship looking for new music they can air.
If I put my whole CD out there on the web, won't my CD sales go down?
1.) Absolutely, but the number of people you will reach will go up.
Isn't it awfully expensive to pay for web hosting for all that bandwidth?
1) Our hosting company, Servage, charges $6.45/month to allow us to stream 10GB of data a day. That's over 2000 songs a day! (If you do happen to use them, use this coupon code: CUST15380 and HotWorship gets 2 months of free hosting and you'll get an extra 2.5GB of storage as well. And by the way, they allow up to 25 different domain names to be hosted there as well, so you could get some other musicians to go in on it with you.)
2) There are a number of free services, such as Download.com, MySpace, etc. that let you put up your music for free. The bad side is that HotWorship can't deep-link to these sites. Also, forcing your visitors to go to another site adds more confusion to the whole web experience and increases the likelihood they will be distracted with other things at the outside site. It's great to have your songs out on multiple sites, but having your songs directly available on your own site is best. Keep it simple.
Is there anything else I should know?
1) When you make your MP3, be sure to include the artist name, album name, song name, and web site included in the MP3 tags. You could even include the lyrics in there if you want. That way listeners can track you down in the file sharing frenzy world we live in.