This website allows you to stream live high quality audio easily. It also integrates with facebook & mobile devices, making it a popular choice because of it's ease of accessibility. It's perfect for podcasters, bands, live acts, DJs, conference organisers, journalists and many more.
This website is basically an in-browser DAW. Everything is hosted in "the cloud", online. It is slightly restricted because everything is hosted online so you cannot create very advanced and memory heavy projects unless you have fast internet. However, the reason this website is popular is because of the fact it's online, people can work on a project at home, go onto another computer somewhere else and load their project straight up from the cloud, or someone else can load the project, edit it, and share it around again.
"SoundCloud is the world’s leading social sound platform where anyone can create sounds and share them everywhere. Recording and uploading sounds to SoundCloud lets people easily share them privately with their friends or publicly to blogs, sites and social networks."
This is probably the most popular website for uploading, sharing, promoting and selling music. It is extremely easy to use, and allows integration with many websites such as facebook, twitter, tumblr etc. It has a massive community of people and it has been made very easy to find new music from the music you like, and allows you to follow other users to watch when they upload new music to share.
Dropbox is all about file hosting in the cloud. Like Audio Tool, you can upload anything you want online, and you'll be able to access it via your account on any computer, laptop, phones etc. Once you've uploaded a file, you will be able to share it with people or keep it private for yourself. If you share a folder online, people can access the files, edit them and re upload them ready for you to download from your phone or computer.
Youtube, although primarily used for video hosting & streaming, has became very popular for promoting and ripping music. This is because youtube has a massive user base of millions of people checking for new content daily, and the ease of access & integration with other websites. An artist can create a youtube account, upload their songs, and the fans can subscribe to them so they get told when new videos get loaded. You can then rate and comment on the video, essentially giving the artist feedback. You can then integrate the video onto pretty much any website made, from facebook to someones own website. This ease of access means you don't even have to change web page to listen to someones latest song.
Facebook is probably the number one place for sharing, promoting, and advertising music. Everything is all together in one place, and pretty much every important website that a artist will user (soundcloud/dropbox/youtube) can be directly integrated onto facebook to keep everything in one tidy place. People can like their artists and follow their movement as they give updates on what they are doing, news on live shows or maybe an album release, and share their music from soundcloud, or a live gig video that was uploaded onto youtube.
Myspace works the exact same way as facebook does, although it was made before facebook. It was revolutionary in the way that people could go onto one page and see all of an artists information, their photos and videos, live gig dates, and even talk with the artists. However, since the introduction of facebook, myspace has became slowly less and less popular, simply because facebook is a lot faster and easier to use.
The method of marketing music now in 2011 is extremely different to how you would do it 10 years ago, and it is all because of one thing: the internet. Before it existed (or when it wasn't very popular or accessible) a band or artist would have to get noticed through other methods, such as live gigs, fliers, posters, word of mouth, radio etc. Generally speaking, because it was harder to get noticed, only people who worked hard and actually had talent would get big. People would see a great band play live, and talk about it to their friends, who might then see some posters to another gig, or hear their song on the radio. This may seem easy, but with so many people trying to get noticed, it wasn't easy.
Today though, anyone could start up a facebook page, tell all their friends to follow them on it, and then they could upload their music to soundcloud, share their live gig videos from youtube, and even allow fans to listen to live gigs as they happen for free without being there by streaming the audio through mixlr. It is so easy for people to promote themselves now, and because of this, there has been a lack of good music/artists because you don't have to put in as much effort to get yourself out there and noticed then you would have had to 10 years ago.
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