All about alonetone

Alonetone provides free and unlimited mp3 hosting and distribution for musicians.

In English: If you make music and you own the rights to it (didn't sell your soul), this site is something you should know about. Go sign up! and see if it can help you out.

No, it is a website to connect listeners and musicians. We work our butt off to give musicians the tools they need to distribute their music on their own.

If you love music but don't make it yourself, great. There are tons of gems on this site, and a lot of talent. Hang out with us, listen a while. Heck, signup and make playlists of your favorite tunes if you are so excited!

If you made the music, then of course! Go sign up.

If you didn't make the music, and just want to share it, then no...go elsewhere!

Commercial services for musicians exist. We want to give you something different. We are not interested in making a buck off of you. We are interested in getting musicians on their feet on the web and allowing folks to solidly deliver their music, known or unknown.

Even the other 'free' services you'll run into elsewhere are running ads or funded by investors hoping to make it big and meanwhile making money off of your "content"...erm music

Beyond that, we want to do it right. Clean, and only the essentials.

Right now, all concept and programming is handled by me, Sudara

My music has been online (for free) since 2002 at ModernThings along with a fine group of friends, most of whom are somewhere here, too!

I got some good help on the visual side from a talented designer by the name of Samo

As long as alonetone exists.

Nope. There are many places that you can sell your music at, if you want to take a crack at it.

I personally believe (and always have) that selling mp3s really won't bring the average musician much luck.

If you have a marketing machine behind you or already have 1000s of fans, this is another story.

I believe that you can and should be able to. But not by selling mp3s, sorry. The music world is changing fast, and the selling mp3s option is a short-term and short-lived last ditch effort on behalf of the changing industry. Radiohead and NIN are getting away with it...but you? At this point, your best bet is to play live, or get your music into as many hands as you can. We can help with the latter. As far as other 'new' methods, I've got a couple ideas along these lines, some of which play off of alonetone. In time, you might see some of them appear! Ask me about them if you want at sudara [AT] alonetone [dizzot] com

That is the most important bit, but there is more.

You can create and organize playlists of your music or the music of others.
You can track who is listening to your music, andfrom where. You can put your music on any website, and we handle all of the traffic. You upload it once here, then use it wherever you want(facebook, myspace, etc)

Anywho, nothing to lose, so stop reading, take 45 seconds and sign up.

Cool. Do it. Over email. Or use another service. But not here!
We're on your side, but this is the wrong venue. We're small time normal human being musicians,

and running into copyright issues and having to delete tracks and accounts is not something we want to handle.

There are some costs, primarily the storage costs. If the site grows much larger, they will be significant, but not unmanageable.

I pay these out of pocket for a few reasons: I want to promote independent music and display the wonderful amazing fact that the music distribution model has changed. I mean, one average person can singlehandedly float thousands of musicians and tens of thousands of mp3s and hundreds of thousands of downloads. Incredible - it points to crazy amazing future world of music. Oh yeah, and with current industry turbulence, I want to make sure the average kid and professional has access to free distribution.

In the event that the I can no longer afford to singlehandedly keep alonetone up, the popularity of the site and the sheer volume of users needed to produce the cost would likely ensure that it would be kept afloat by other like-minded do good-ers.

I have no current intention to pollute the site with advertising or treat the musicians on the site so poorly as to earn a living off of their music before they do.

With love.

And Ruby. And Rails. And the help of 1000s of Open Source programmers

who have made various pieces of this site without even knowing it themselves.

alonetone is about 2000 lines of rails code and about the same amount of javascript and css.

We use
Attachment_fu Amazon S3 for mp3 hosting SASS, will_paginate, rspec, jquery, low pro. Sound is done with Sound Manager 2

You bet. It is available via git at the alonetone git repository and you can browse the latest release here We are looking for development help, so go ahead and email me if you are interested.