HOW TO Upload and share your music

1 Build your Bandcamp

Bandcamp (bandcamp.com) makes it easy to stream, share and sell your music online. Once you’ve signed up – which is free – you simply use the ‘+ add’ button to add tracks. You can decide whether to sell them and if so, for how much.

2 Add more info

In addition to artwork, you can add tags to help people discover your music. You can also choose to apply Creative Commons copyright options to explicitly give people permission to share, remix or edit your tracks.

3 Customise your ’camp

Bandcamp’s pages are very flexible, so you can add your own images, change the colour scheme, decide which track to feature and so on. When you make changes they’re stored as a draft: you can see it but it isn’t live until you publish.

4 Start a SoundCloud

SoundCloud (soundcloud.com) offers streaming (downloads are for paying customers), and is easy to set up. Here we’ve picked a track and an image; the next step is to enter genre details, plus add tags and descriptive data.

5 Maybe master it

Mastering can make a song sound better and SoundCloud’s option is quite effective – but it’s £4.99 for one song. If you’re going to be sharing a lot of music it might be worth learning the mastering plug-ins in your audio app instead.

6 Customise your ’cloud

As with Bandcamp you can customise your artist page with header and artist images, but unlike Bandcamp listeners can leave likes and comments on your tracks. If you’ve made an error in your track data you can edit it here.

7 Get on Apple Music

If you aren’t a big-name artist you can’t upload to Apple Music or Spotify directly, but you can do it through a third-party distributor such as DistroKid (distrokid.com). It enables you to get your music to all the key platforms.

8 Edit the info

Online music stores require certain bits of information before they’ll stock your music, such as songwriter details and whether it should have an “explicit” rating. You can also set your price for Apple and Amazon sales.

9 Share it everywhere

DistroKid has a feature called Hyperfollow that creates a single page with links to your music on each service you’ve chosen to use. That means you can share a single link online instead of coding one for each service.