Dedicated Music Site - http://music.daveeddy.com

Three years ago I released my first album Memories. This album was recorded from 2008 to 2012, and contains songs written from as early as 2006. The recordings were resurrected, mastered, and finalized in 2014. Most of these songs were composed in college, with a few done in high school and some after college as well.

I uploaded this album to BandCamp, SoundCloud, and iTunes. Since then, I’ve made a lot more music that I’ve uploaded to SoundCloud, as well as randomly to my YouTube channel. While these sites and services have been great, in the last 3 years I’ve identified 3 main issues I have using them.

1. Cost

I pay a yearly fee to have my album hosted on iTunes as well as other services (spotify, etc.) using TuneCore. I pay a yearly fee to SoundCloud to have as many tracks as I have uploaded to them. And, while I don’t pay a yearly fee to BandCamp, I do pay a percentage of any of the proceeds I make from my album sales (which has been nothing in the last 2.5 years). In the last 2 years I’ve made around $3.00 from my music, and have paid over $100.00 in hosting fees.

I don’t mind paying for good service - and these services are great! But when it comes down to it, I’m just not that popular of an artist, and I don’t make much money off of music - certainly not enough to cover these costs. Part of the cost, of course, is for them to store and serve my music files over the Internet, which brings me to my next point:

2. Hosting

I’d prefer to host my music files myself if I can. I’d like to control what flac and mp3 files get distributed, as well as what files specifically are added to any zip files I choose to make available. That is, I want to be the one to run the zip command on any files I’m releasing.

3. Price

I really don’t have much control over the price of my music. On BandCamp I can set my own prices (which is awesome!) but with iTunes and other services, I don’t really have that option. $10 for an album and $0.99 for a song is a good price for most cases, but I would like to have fine-tune control over the prices.

Solution

My solution to this problem is to host all of my music and the music site myself. I wrote the web page myself in basic HTML/JavaScript/CSS, and host it on the server I already use to host this blog through Joyent.

Music Site - http://music.daveeddy.com

This way, I’ll be able to:

  1. Sync my music directly from my music workstation iMac to this server with a simple rsync script
  2. Control the quality of the files that are streamed (I HATE listening to low quality versions of my music)
  3. Control the price

At the time of this writing not all of my music is on the new site, but that will change as I am currently working on 3 (yes, three!) new albums for 2017.

As a bit of a celebration for this new site, I’m making a change that is long overdue. Just like how all of my code is available for free on GitHub, all of my music is available for free on music.daveeddy.com! You may purchase the music for a price of $0.00, but are free to pay whatever you would like. For that amazingly low price you can download FLAC or mp3 (V0) quality tracks directly from the site.

Just to clarify, my music is not released under a Creative Commons License, but instead is available for purchase for $0.00.

Here’s to music.daveeddy.com!