So, your an artist or label who’s selling music rather than giving it away. Even better, your giving away a track or more to promote the record more or whatever your viral marketing strategy is. On average with iTunes, a label/artist will receive £0.49p from each sale plus mechanical’s if that’s applicable. This is non negotiable, as it stands you won’t get any more. At one point, Apple were going to raise it to do with how well the pound was converting etc. Ooooops, but that certainly isn’t happening right now. So we’re stuck. But there’s a simple and easy way to earn a bit more from those sales…. become an affiliate. There are various schemes out there, I know Amazon offer one, even better… iTunes do too here. Even if your not, your a blog site, use the deep links promoting the point of sale and you’ll find the site will start earning you a little bit more money.

A few more tips for you. Your an artist who gives music away for free, doesn’t matter, get your music on the online retail stores, just because you feel like giving it away for free, the consumer might not want to or even come across the place they can download it from. Let me give you another scenario, someone’s listening to their radio, they’re an avid iTunes user, they hear your song, like it, search the music store for you but find no results. I know your not gutted about the lost sale, because your giving it away for free , but you’ve lost out on a fan, which is 100 times worse. Just because it’s your choice to concentrate on one method, you’ve can’t expect the potential out there to change along with you.

One last tip, if you are deep linking, for example on MySpace, don’t deep link straight from the profile page. Link to your webiste or a PHP301 redirect page or HTML timed redirect (Google it, learn it), that way, you can monitor traffic and ensure Apple recognise your deep link code from your specified URL.

Happy New Year.