Best way to set up a music website?

[recall]

Now then lads I know a few of you are dab hands with the net etc.

My story is as follows. Years ago I made a record, it was supposed to come out on a label. Label went bust, my life changed and I couldn't get the record out. I kind of forgot about it and haven't listened to it in about 3or4 yrs.
Until tonight while driving back from cardiff. I must say I was quite pleased with it. It is very rough but in a good way.

I still can't afford to press it up, and it doesn't represent my music now but i would like to put it out there.

I want to set up a little web site where it will be downloadable....fa free I think. Basically I want to design artwork and remaster it....I can do both of these, but I need a home for it.
So that when someone downloads it they'll have a folder with the mp3's and the pdf/jpg artwork (like when you download from boomkat).

How would I go about this? Is there something really easy out there to design simple websites (mac)? I want to be able to do it myself so I have full control over it.

I know I can buy a domain name like "westwalesgothic.com" but what happens then?

All and any help would be much appreciated


I already have a Myspace site and don't want to go that route for this. I will of course link my new page to my Myspace site once it is up.

Basically I should only need 3 or 4 pages for Bio/making of, pics and download page.

In fact all this could probably go on one long scrollable page.

I was thinking of some of the blogspot pages but Ideally I would like a unique website address.


Cheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeers!

[recall]

Don't you have to pay a monthly .mac fee for that?

I have seen this product mrsite.co.uk which looks good and is very reasonable.

[theblue1]

You need to find a website host (there are some very affordable ones out there -- but the amount of services, allotted bandwidth, and space you get vary widely -- as does reliability, server response times, and so on -- sad to say, it's your basic consumer shopping conundrum).

And then, since you want to control it yourself, you need to find a web design tool that won't cost an arm and a leg (like quasi-industry standard Dreamweaver will) but will be flexible and not junk up your code. (Hopefully.)

iWeb is, I think, free with your Mac. And, while I haven't used it, I imagine it's got a decent interface (it is, after all, from Apple, who do interfaces pretty well, as a rule). But it writes junk code. That might not be that big an issue to you -- as long as it doesn't get confused by its own code (which is the big bugaboo in WYSIWYG editors, particularly those that violate generally accepted rules of web design as iWeb does.

[For those of you who follow these things, iWeb writes CSS styles directly into tags, which is a big no-no. It will generally work but it's not the way CSS was designed to be used and it's a total pain if a real designer wants to work on your page or you decide to get serious later. Still, it's free, huh?]

Anyhow, once you've got your music uploaded you can offer downloads of song files and artwork quite easily (you can use a zip file if you want to bundle things -- stay away from Stuff-It files, though, because few Windows users have Stuff-It and the downloadle "free" versions for Windows are a blinking mess, actually come-on-ware of a quite annoying kind. I finally had to tell my Mac using clients that I simply do not support Stuff-It files and that they should use zip or one of the other non-proprietary compression formats.

There are also options for "monetizing" (you should pardon the expression) your downloads that are plug-in type applications. Setting them up is probably a little harder than putting together a straightforward web page -- but for what they do, they presumably save a LOT of work.

Here's one I've never tried but heard good things about: a 1-2-3 Music Store - sell music downloads


And, of course, another option is to put your music in the major stores (iTunes, Rhapsody, Yahoo, etc) by using something like TuneCore.

And finally, there is the Soundclick option: host your music on Soundclick and let them handle the money side (for a slice, of course). SC has been going over a visual and infrastructure overhaul and they have some really nice features now, adopting some social networking features -- while maintaining a higher level of security than, say, MySpace (not hard, of course -- MySpace is pretty much a cesspool of potential malware infection a this point because of their shoddy programming and security). Soundclick allows unlimited 128 kbps Mp3 uploads for free (up to 10 MB per file in size) or unlimited high bandwidth/high fi Mp3s (can't remember the per file size limit there) with their pay accounts. They also have a cute little player widget you can plug into your website and/or blog (or MySpace page if you still go there). [You can see my player plugged into my band page.]

There are other music hosting sites, too, SC is not the only one by a stretch, but it's got developed traffic and its infrastructure is pretty solid.

And, as a bonus, they already went through the malware-ad-piggybacking threat that's been hitting some other popular sites (two days last summer) and should, hopefully, be better braced than CNN, The Economist, Yahoo, and a number of other major sites that were serving up malware adverts unbeknownst to their webmasters...

[recall]

Ahh. Cool. I like the designs in iweb. So I now need to find a host which will allow downloads.

it'll be folder with 18 mp3's and a pdf/jpg artwork