Noise Trade (Give Music Away to Get More Fans) is now FREE!!!

http://www.noisetrade.com

I've been looking into noisetrade.com for a while now, planning to use it as a way to help spread the word about my music whenever I finally got an album recorded. There was a one-time fee of $250 for an artist to register their album or demo with Noise Trade, which I was happy to find is now completely eliminated. Their reasoning was "we need to practice what we preach" -- as in giving away something for free with the idea that it will help spread the word faster. More about why they decided to eliminate the fee HERE.

Anyway, I am very excited, and I signed up a earlier this week with a bunch of demo songs (I figured since its free now, it was worth a shot now instead of waiting til I have a complete album). I didn't post my widget anywhere yet, I just wanted to see what would happen strictly through the site. The first day I got 1 new download of my demo, and every day since there has been about 1 new download, which means I now have 4 new fans/mailing list members, and 20 potential new fans, just from signing up with Noise Trade! (Not bad I say) Today was the first day I didn't get any new downloads/fans, which I kind of expected since there doesn't seem to be an easy way to search by genre or really by anything right now--There is just an alphabetical listing and a "most recent" listing, so new albums seem to get buried within a few days, unless their name starts with and "A". Not too smart really, but since Noise Trade is new to the Free Signups, I suspect they will start upgrading their search options as they start to get a lot more sign ups. That said, I'm sure it would help if I tried to advertise my widget myself, but I think I might save that effort for my real album...we'll see ;-) Either way, it seems to me that even though this service is still somewhat in the beginning stages (1 year old so far), it can be a very valuable tool to help artists gain more fans the old-fashioned way -- by word of mouth! I wish I had an album ready now, because I think this is probably the prime time to get signed up, while there are not a ton of other artists yet to get buried under!

Just for fun, here's the widget for the demo I posted on Noise Trade: