How to Self-Publish Your Recorded Music for Free or Almost Free

You're a great musician. Maybe you are also part of a group of great musicians. You play in gigs around town, for dances, parties, weddings, concerts, local festivals, and you've amassed quite a repertoire of material, and maybe even a local fan base. Well, it's about time you packaged yourselves up in a CD people can take home with them. You don't have to spend a lot on studio rental, unless you really want to. Making CDs from recordings of some of your live events will give you CDs with an extra zing of life that studio recordings don't always have. Read on to learn how to self-publish your recorded music for free or almost free.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Things You’ll Need:

• Portable digital recording equipment
• A computer with a large enough hard drive to manage opening and editing large audio files
• Audacity sound editing program, which is open source (free) or your favorite other sound editing software
• GIMP open source Graphical Image Manipulation Program, or your favorite other graphics software

1. Make recordings of a few of your performances by reading and following the eHow article entitled "How to Digitally Record your Own Live Music Performances with Portable Equipment." You don't even have to rearrange your schedule around making a recording. Just record some of your regular gigs.
2. Edit the recordings into one or more CD albums by reading and following eHow's "How to Edit your Recorded Music into an Album CD." Keep in mind, though, that if you save your music in the format native to your sound editing software, that you will also want to export it to .mp3 files. This is a widely accepted file format that you will need for the mass production process, in the next steps.
3. Research which online self-publishing service you would like to upload your files to and create an account on it. There are more, but a few good ones are LuLu, BookSurge, CDBaby and CreateSpace. Some of these services will even provide you with templates for your label and cover art. If not, you will have to measure them on your own and upload the right sized cover art.
4. Design your album cover and insert. The reason you chose a publishing service before this step is that some of the services offer graphics templates to design your label and cover around. You will need some familiarity with graphics software, such as GIMP open source Graphical Image Manipulation Program, and maybe a digital camera if you want to picture yourselves on the cover. Make yourselves gorgeous, make yourselves wonderful in your bios, and play up all the cool titles and histories of your music selections.
5. Upload your music or cover art, and set your prices. The publishing services spell out how much of the price goes toward production costs, and how much of it goes to the musician or group. You can designate whether a little or a lot goes to yourself. But you will know what your pay-as-you-go costs will be up front.
6. Order a few of your own CD albums at cost to have available at your concerts and gigs. Some gigs will surprise you, and you'll run out of copies. If this happens, be sure and have business cards ready directing people to where they can order your CD online. Of course the publishing service takes care of the credit card orders and shipping for you.

Tips & Warnings

• On demand online self publishing services save you a lot on up front costs that you don't have to lay out of pocket right away, but in the long-term, a traditional publishing service with large production runs are cheaper. But you then pay in advance and carry the inventory yourself.