… and do a good free job for the major labels and owners of those services. How do those free mp3 services actually make money? How can they afford standing firm behind the independent scene and helping the million of promising young artist to get some attention?

They do not do anything of this sort – to the contrary, you are the useful tool who is going to do the job and earn money for them.

Just to clarify: I picked Soundclick and Lastfm just as random examples, I try not to mention others because I do not want to promote them for free, that is all. The business model is roughly the same for all those free mp3/band promotion/social sites. Of those Lastfm actually has some value (and is not purely free-mp3/social), as a measuring tool, but this is outside of the scope of this article.

Before we start, a little riddle to solve for you:
Try and guess how many song plays in a year’s time you will get on Reverbnation without promoting your profile? You will find the answer in the last paragraph of this article.

a) 0
b) 4
c) 100.000

The useful tool: yourself

You are looking at one of the free mp3 / social sites and think it may be a good idea to use them to promote your band. You have nothing to loose, you give your music away for free anyway. So you create a profile, upload your songs and… guess – nothing happens.

You are getting an odd visitor or two a month and that is it. You go to the help section of your free mp3 service and bingo, here it is – “how to increase the number of your visitors”. So how? Very simply – pay for various premium services.

Or, even simpler – advertise your profile, tell your friends, family members and their dogs, put the address up on all your promotional materials. Send emails, friend requests, ask anybody you can to join. Put it up on your Myspace. Easy, isn’t it?

Hold on a second, who is promoting who? The goal was to promote your music, and the effect is that you are promoting some exotic free mp3/social websites. They will be glad to make money off the traffic you generate for them, and sell the ads to the big guys in the music industry with corporate packages on Soundclick starting at 5000 US dollars. Instead of doing something for yourself, you have just done a great job for the free mp3 service owners – well done.