Distribution and promotion and promotion used to be the big, hurdles for recording artists, and that was why they needed to make deals with record companies. Now distribution is easy, thanks to the Internet. An Internet distribution strategy has two parts: your own personal website and as many music distribution and broadcast sites as you can manage. Always have your own personal site with photos, contact information, and links to where fans can hear and purchase your music. This increases your search engine presence, and it makes it easy for fans to find you. Do please resist the urge to make this a typical overproduced site full of special effects and animations and dark, barely readable color schemes; this guarantees you will chase away your visitors. Make it clean, simple, readable, and easy to navigate, because nobody cares how self-indulgent your web designer is. They want to know about you and how to hear your music, and they don’t want to jump through hoops to get there.

You should have a consistent online identity. The first step to building your online identity is to register your own domain name. Don’t have an email address or domain name that promotes someone else’s business, like [email protected] or [email protected]. Free email addresses are seriously uncool anyway. Domain names are cheap, about $15 per year. If you change web hosts and email service providers, your domain name will always travel with you. Suppose you have a band—let’s say you’re The Bandits—and your domain is http://thebandits.com/. Now you can do all kinds of creative things with the domain name. Everyone in your band can have their own email address, such as [email protected], [email protected], or [email protected]. No matter what music distributors, hosting services, or social networking sites you try, http://thebandits.com/ will always be there for your fans to find you.

There are all kinds of domain name registrars such as Dotster, GoDaddy, Register.com, Tucows, and many more. Most web hosting services also include domain name registration, but I would keep the two separate. Web hosting is a brutal business full of fly-by-nights that come and go, and a bad registrar can make it difficult to transfer to another registrar, or you can even lose your domain name. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) oversees domain names and maintains a list of accredited registrars (http://www.icann.org/en/registrars/accredited-list.html). This doesn’t guarantee that their customer service or prices are any good, just that they are legitimate registrars. WebHostingTalk (http://www.webhostingtalk.com/) is a great source of real-world information on hosting services and registrars.

Think carefully about what kind of contact information to put on your sites, because thanks to the magic of the Internet, communications can turn into a deep time sink. If you don’t want to spend a lot of time answering emails, Tweets, forum posts, and so on, then limit how people can reach you. A web form protected by a captcha is a good way to allow fans to talk to you without getting buried by spam. Captchas that use simple arithmetic problems or multiple-choice questions (“If you are a human, click the picture of the puppy.”) are easy and effective. The kind that obscure text are annoying and hard for everyone but spammers.

Who is a good web designer design? Someone who listens to you; who can explain what they do in plain English (or language of your choice); and who favors clean, fast, navigable site design over fancy show-off stuff that chases your fans away. Always test your sites on a dial-up connection and on a smartphone. Broadband is far from universal, and mobile Internet use is exploding, so you need to be tuned in to how your site looks and performs on slow connections and on tiny screens.

Consider having a rented snail mailbox. It’s reliable, it weeds out the casual stream-of-consciousness Twitter/email communiques, and it ensures that anyone who really wants to talk to you can do so.

What about MySpace and Facebook? Go for it; they’re free, and you’ll probably be pleasantly surprised at who finds you there. Budget some time to keep them current. You don’t have to log in every day to have deep, meaningful conversations with fans, but definitely make sure that links and information about all of your recordings and performances are current. It takes time to build a following, so be patient and read all of the helpful information that tells you how to get the most benefit out of MySpace and Facebook. There are no fast, magic solutions, and you shouldn’t believe anyone who tries to sell you some.

Never ever spam. Do not believe “marketers” who claim they sell genuine guaranteed opt-in mail lists full of people who are happy to hear from you. This is a lie. You should carefully build your own mailing lists. The right way is to have a confirmed opt-in, which means when someone signs up, they have to respond to an email that is sent to confirm their registration. Make opting out easier than signing up; the lesson that marketers and spammers refuse to learn is you can’t force people to like you.

Do be careful—there is no such thing as privacy online. Everything you say is a public performance and recorded forever.

You’ll have to measure your own tolerance for texting, Twitter, and whatever other newfangled communication tools come along. They can be powerful and effective, and they can drive you crazy.