Hi everyone. I'm in the process of learning how to compose music. I've made several tracks, but I'm not sure where I should post them online (aside from putting them on my website). It's mainly for demo purposes, possibly for a portfolio. I heard about Sound Cloud, but I don't know much about it and have never used it before. Is YouTube an option?

As an example, DeviantArt is an informal community for posting art. Do you know of a site like this for music (or is Sound Cloud the only one)? What do you use?

Thanks,

On Rye

If it is just for a portfolio I would go with Sound Cloud. You get up to 2 hours of audio for free and it's easy to network with other people. Personally I love Sound Cloud but the other big one that a lot of people use is BandCamp. For YouTube you would need some kind of visual to go with your music, so that depends on how into the visual side you want to get.

YouTube is definitely an option, in fact most of my traffic goes from there.

I'd say SoundCloud is a must too, but unlike YouTube it seems to be mostly used by "audio" people and I only use it because it hosts all the audio from my website and recently, to get some feedback through CloudKillers - http://goo.gl/EblA3P

I've seen a lot of people using BandCamp, but personally I have just a couple of tracks there and never really focused on it.

Vimeo is another option, and I've heard that it's a good one because all sorts of professionals browse it and use it.

And lastly - LastFM and MySpace, but wouldn't expect much of them :)

Thank you. I think I'm leaning toward YouTube and BandCamp. I like BandCamp's easy navigation, but I imagine most people would be more likely to stumble across my music on YouTube. I'm going to try them both out and see what happens. Do you have any tips in particular for posting in these two places?

I checked out your YouTube page, Stormwave. You have a lot of cool stuff.

On Rye

Thanks :)

For YouTube, I'd say that those would be videos as any others. If you want to optimize them for search engines, detailed and clean descriptions and relevant tags are a good place to start. There are plenty of tutorials available, by users and in YouTube Creator Academy. I don't think you need any complex visuals, your logo or simple picture should suffice. There's a dodgy topic of using art from existing games, movies etc... and though it's a common practice, it's not entirely legal.

I would also advise you to heavily promote your portfolio either way, sitting around and waiting for people to come to you most likely won't really yield much results at first.

Thanks

For YouTube, I'd say that those would be videos as any others. If you want to optimize them for search engines, detailed and clean descriptions and relevant tags are a good place to start. There are plenty of tutorials available, by users and in YouTube Creator Academy. I don't think you need any complex visuals, your logo or simple picture should suffice. There's a dodgy topic of using art from existing games, movies etc... and though it's a common practice, it's not entirely legal.

I would also advise you to heavily promote your portfolio either way, sitting around and waiting for people to come to you most likely won't really yield much results at first.

Ok. I'll look into that. As far as visuals go, I'll attempt to make album artwork for the tracks.

As far as promotion goes, I definitely agree; but it might be a challenge for me though, because I don't know much about social media at all. I suppose putting links in my signature would help.