Get Paid for Giving Your Music Away with trueAnthem

When most artists opt to give their music away for free these days, they do it with the acceptance that the music will primarily become an impetus toward a “greater good”: heightened notoriety, increased ticket and merch sales, etc.

But what if you could have the best of both worlds? What if you could make your music available for free and still generate income from the resulting downloads?

One company’s innovative new model enables artists to do just that.

Based out of San Francisco and launched last year, trueAnthem (www.trueanthem.com) is an online promotion and distribution company. Through trueAnthem viral players (i.e., widgets), artists can make their music available for free download and/or for purchase (in each case, the tracks are DRM-free and are also “streamable” through the player). This article focuses on the free download option.

An artist who wants to take advantage of trueAnthem’s free download service is required to sign a short contract with the company and fill out a questionnaire. Once these steps have been taken, trueAnthem will proceed to search for an appropriate advertiser match for the artist (artists have final approval over advertiser matching). When a match is found, the artist must then record a “trueAd” to be inserted at the beginning of each track that’s being made available for free (it is these ads that allow artists to get paid for free downloads). In a trueAd, an artist typically announces their name (and/or the name of their band), the title of the song which the ad is introducing, and the name of the advertiser. Each ad is about 5 to 8 seconds long. Depending on their particular agreement with trueAnthem, an artist is paid between $.10 and $.40 per track that is downloaded for free through their personalized viral player; this can be quite lucrative for artists with substantial fanbases.

It is important to note, though, that the contract which trueAnthem requires an artist to sign is exclusive and typically lasts for 12 months; during this period of time, the artist cannot enter into other contracts with the content that’s being promoted on the trueAnthem platform. One of the few other concerns that artists may have related to using trueAnthem to distribute free music verses using other methods (methods that do not see artists generate any income from the resulting downloads) involves the fact that, under the trueAnthem model, there is an ad at the beginning of each song. However, the “invasiveness” of trueAds is minimal in comparison to the invasiveness of ads that are used in the majority of ad-supported models; remember, trueAds typically only run 5 to 8 seconds in length. Furthermore, trueAnthem’s model differs from other ad-supported models in the sense that a trueAd is recorded by the artist whose song the ad is introducing. Artists, therefore, can show their personalities in the ads and can use the ads to help establish their brands in the minds of their listeners. I suspect that many fans would actually enjoy this.

For artists who want to offer free content without completely sacrificing the monetary value of music downloads, the trueAnthem model is certainly an avenue worth exploring. For more on how the trueAnthem model works, visit www.trueanthem.com to read the FAQs and/or to request more information. And here’s an example of a trueAnthem viral player (this is the player of the band, Grove Hill, and it is the best example that I found of a player in which the artist does a good job of showing their personality through the trueAds):