How to Sell Music Online with WooCommerce

The music market is among the oldest in the world, managing to infiltrate everyone’s daily life. It’s not surprising to see the rise of services dedicated to music streaming, such as Spotify or Amazon Music, nor is it surprising to witness their growing popularity over the years.

While these services are certainly the most widely used, it is wrong to think that they have a monopoly on the music world. Many artists and record labels underestimate the importance of having their own website, where they can autonomously manage their tracks and sell them to their audience.

Throughout this article, we will see how to create a website dedicated to promoting and selling music online, uncovering the benefits associated with this type of business and how it’s achievable with minimal effort by combining WordPress and WooCommerce.

Think of this as a guide to digital marketing for online music, to help you create an eCommerce platform that allows you to take the next step in your business.

Don’t worry if you’re not yet familiar with the tools we’ve mentioned, as we’ll look into them in more detail in the following sections.

Why Build Your Music Empire with WooCommerce?

The first question that naturally arises when discussing the music industry is: why create an online music shop with WooCommerce?

This is a legitimate question, considering there are already numerous other solutions available for professionals in this field. For those moving into the digital world, there’s Spotify, while for those selling physical records, there are marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, and much more.

Is there truly a need to invest time and money in creating a personal website? The answer is yes, 100%.

We usually underestimate the importance of such a tool, but it offers undeniable advantages, for example:

• Being in control of your business – Relying on an existing platform certainly has its positive perks, particularly in reaching a larger audience and reducing your workload, but these advantages also come with constraints. Constraints on earnings, freedom of expression, distribution, and promotion. Additionally, building an entire business or persona on a social platform can pose a risk because in extreme cases, such as bans or shadowbans, you’ll have to start over from scratch.
• Reaching more people – Whether you’ve never stepped foot online with your music or have only operated on pre-existing platforms, there are still significant growth opportunities online. Don’t forget websites get indexed by search engines and they can also become a common hub for all your social media and listeners, bringing them together under one banner.
• Increasing your earnings – It is estimated that Spotify pays its artists an amount ranging from $0.003 to $0.005 per play. It’s obvious there’s room for improvement there for a musician or a band. The same is true for physical products: selling through a physical store incurs a sales commission, which translates to lower earnings for you.
• Connecting with listeners – In times like the one we’re living in, where human contact is increasingly deteriorating, users are starting to swim against the current. There’s a reason why concerts still exist despite music being available anytime and anywhere. Having your own portal means offering a place for your listeners to reach you and get your music directly from you. Furthermore, sites built with WooCommerce give you the flexibility to manage product sales however you want. Do you want to offer free trials? Subscriptions? Physical products? Digital products? All of it? You can do anything with WooCommerce.

Of course, there are other advantages, but we believe we’ve conveyed the idea. And, of course, before creating your online store, you need to build a business model to follow now and in the future.

Choosing the Right Music to Sell Online

Most people looking for a way to sell their music online already have a clear idea of the product they’ll offer, but this isn’t necessarily the case for everyone. There are market niches that might be unknown or anonymous to those who have primarily operated in the real world, and they could represent significant earning opportunities.

Let’s explore some popular genres of music that thrive online.

Music by Artists and Bands

Let’s start with the basics: Clearly, a musician or band needs their own space and portal that represents them. This will serve both for commercial contacts (offering a much higher level of professionalism than just providing an email address or a phone number and redirecting people to a social network) and for fans, so they can feel closer to their favorite artists.

Creating your own portal can present immense earning opportunities for an artist or musical group. They have the chance to sell subscriptions, digital music, CDs, vinyl records, and merchandise, all in one place without having to pay commissions to any platform.

Additionally, the website can serve as an excellent platform for the latest news, such as announcements of new albums, tours, and much more.

Instrumental Music

Another particularly prolific market niche is that of instrumental tracks. These are used by numerous professionals and non-professionals alike, including:

• Musicians – I know it sounds like a vicious cycle, but singer-songwriters, bands, and music producers can use instrumental tracks to create their own pieces, simplifying their work thanks to having a base to start from.
• DJs – Both amateur and professional DJs can use instrumental tracks to create mixes, both as a learning tool and for their own creations.
• Music enthusiasts – It’s not uncommon for people to search for instrumental tracks to listen to simply because they’re passionate about that genre of music. Additionally, this content pairs well with study, work, and meditation sessions, as the lyrics of songs can distract the listener.
• Video game developers – One thing that music and video games have in common is their significant presence in the indie sector. It’s not uncommon for a development team to search for music for their games, even for established companies in the market.

In addition to these, there are music schools, students, companies, and many other markets that should not be underestimated.

Royalty-Free Music

Another excellent area for gaining exposure and traction toward other types of products is that of royalty-free music. These are musical tracks free of copyright restrictions that can be used freely, provided that the author is listed in the credits.

These have become particularly sought after with the rise of content creators, as it’s not easy to find musical tracks for videos that don’t pose copyright issues.

Producing free and unrestricted tracks can be an excellent way to promote your music by taking advantage of the popularity of content creators.

Selling Audio with WooCommerce

Is selling music online complicated? Absolutely not, in fact, WooCommerce already allows the sale of both physical and virtual products through its basic configuration. Of course, this is a process that can be improved and optimized, but we’ll see that later. Meanwhile, let’s see how to create a music-type product to sell.

First, you need to decide whether to sell music digitally (allowing customers to download the album to their computer) or to sell it physically and ship the record or vinyl to customers’ addresses.

In both cases, the process starts the same way: by creating a product on WooCommerce.

To do this, go to the WooCommerce side menu, to Products > Add New, and you’ll be taken to the creation page. Start by adding a name and description for the product:

Once you’ve done this, go to the section below called “Product data”. Every WooCommerce product starts as a physical product, so if you want to sell CDs or vinyl records, go ahead and add the information, including shipping details, and complete the product.

If instead you want to sell a digital product, allowing customers to download it, check the boxes for “Virtual” and “Downloadable”:

The first checkbox will remove the “Shipping” tab from the product options, as it’s not necessary, and the second checkbox will add download options:

As you can see, you can set the price, upload the files customers can download after buying, and even define how many times they can be downloaded and whether the link expires after a certain period.

Here’s how the product will look in the end:

Clearly, it’s not the best in terms of appearance, since the guide is styled on a basic theme, but it’s functional: customers can add the product to the cart and buy it. The download link will then be sent to them via email and will be available in the downloads section of their account on the website.

While this is sufficient, it’s not necessarily ideal. So let’s go ahead and see some ideas to optimize the sale of musical products.

Creating a Gallery with Videos and Music Tracks

When buying music, it’s important to have a clear idea of what you’re going to hear. If you’re a famous artist selling a sought-after album, then pretty much everyone will know what to expect; but this may be different for most other cases.

Even in the examples we’ve seen before, having the possibility to listen to part of the song or album before buying is crucial to increasing your sales, but how do you offer a demo?

You could insert it as an external link, but this is generally a bad idea: driving your customers away from your site after successfully leading them there can have a huge impact on sales.

For this reason, we recommend the WooCommerce Featured Audio & Video Content plugin. Its functionality is simple: it allows you to add videos and audio files to the product gallery section. This way, you can upload a music video or a portion of a song as a sample.

Let’s see how.

Creating the Perfect Music Track Preview

Once you have installed and activated the plugin, go to the product creation page. In the “Product data” section we saw earlier you’ll find two new tabs, “Video” and “Audio”:

Once you add a music track, it will appear like this on the product page:

The plugin also allows you to decide the playback volume, whether to autoplay the track when users visit the page, and other settings.

Creating a Membership for Audio File Sharing

One of the biggest fears for those who trade digital products is that they will be freely distributed, causing huge economic losses. It’s no coincidence that more and more services are fighting against this form of piracy, often with little success.

How can you protect yourself? You can use the WooCommerce Membership plugin. With it, you can make specific content or pages of your site exclusive to customers who buy a specific product. You can then insert your music on a page and allow access only to those who buy the associated product so that even if the page link is shared around, pirates cannot access it.

Not only that, you could combine it with the features of WooCommerce Subscription to create a monthly subscription that grants access to your music, thus building loyalty among those listeners who help you grow. You can set up a credit system so that with each renewal, the listener receives X credits that they can then use to download music tracks.

The only limit is your imagination.

Now, let’s conclude by sharing some tips and things to avoid.

Tip: Connect WooCommerce to Stripe

We recommend you make the payment process fast and seamless. For this, you can connect Stripe (which allows credit card payments) and PayPal to your store.

While these are important for physical products (which can also be paid for with cash on delivery or bank transfer), they are crucial for digital products.

Stripe is a secure and reliable payment provider that uses end-to-end encryption to protect customers’ payment information. It’s also easy to use and it integrates seamlessly with advanced features like the recurring payments we mentioned earlier.

Tip: Promote Your Music with a Blog

Don’t underestimate the importance of blogging: even though people primarily communicate through social media today, the best way to create content is still the blog. Writing articles dedicated to music will allow you to reach a much wider audience through search engines, reaching people who have made searches consistent with the products you want to sell.

Additionally, blog articles are excellent for creating content to be repurposed later on social media.

All of this will not only increase your visibility but also enhance your image and the perception of your expertise while promoting your products, all in one go.

The 3 Most Common Mistakes When Selling Music Online

1. Short-sighted marketing:

Do you think that just uploading your music online will result in hundreds and hundreds of sales? Fatal mistake! Promotion is crucial, both online and offline, to reach your target audience and make yourself known. Promotion includes blogging, as we discussed earlier, but also market research: look at other artists and record labels to see how they promote and sell their music, and learn from them.

2. One channel, one limitation:

Limiting yourself to a single sales channel, such as a website or a streaming service, is like locking yourself in a cage. Explore different platforms to reach a wider audience and diversify your income. But always make sure to maintain a consistent commitment to all the options you choose: it’s better to devote yourself to two channels than to sporadically use five. Go ahead and experiment to see where your audience lies.

3. Forgetting about fans:

Your fans are not just numbers on a screen. Engage with them on social media, create a newsletter, and offer exclusive content: cultivate a strong and loyal relationship, and they will be more likely to support your music by buying and sharing it. Don’t forget: 1,000 loyal fans are worth more than 100,000 occasional listeners. Listen to what they’re looking for and offer them a personalized experience.

Conclusions

Music is one of the most universal communication tools, which is why you should exploit its full potential. Create an online store and offer a place where your listeners can gather, running your art and business without the constraints many other platforms have.