I am the programmer producer with UK based band CLING, and I also handle a lot of the promotion of our music. Our distribution is handled by Kudos Records and we are on all of the major download sites and a lot of smaller ones and we have formed our own label Clingmusic.

We have a myspace profile @ http://www.myspace.com/sonicspells and we also promote our music via our website and Social/Music networking sites such as Facebook, Bebo Last FM, ReverbNation, iLike and a few others. We have made connections with artists such as Mixmaster Morris, Mark Moore (S Express) Lenny Ibizarre and Youth who have all complimented us on our music.

After the initial task of putting your music online and and then promoting it for a while the harsh reality kicks in that not as many people as you thought are interested in buying music in general, and this begs the question why?

I think there are now a few generations out there who do not think that music costs anything because there will always be somewhere that they can download it free and since they got into music there probably always has been.

With this in mind I set about trying to find a way to give our music away free but still make some money.

The first site that I discovered was Tunesquare.com. we made our music available for free download on the Tunesquare website and within two months we received over $200 paid into our paypal account for ad supported free downloads of our music we even got into our local paper after putting a press release online,the article can be found here
http://www.guardian-series.co.uk/leisure/music/artists/display.var.2029527.0.couple_who_cling_together_sing_together.php

TuneSquare was a new ad-supported music download service that lives somewhere in between the world of illegal P2P sites and paid services like iTunes and Rhapsody and I used the term was at the start of this sentence because sadly for lots of artists they are no longer running but the full details of what they did can be found here http://www.tunesquare.com/?pg=press

After the demise of Tunesquare some research helped us to discover the website co founded by Peter Gabriel We7.com. The new "on demand" music service, launched at We7.com, gives fans access to over 500,000 tracks from Sony BMG and a wide variety of independent artists and labels including us, legally, safely and in a format they want. The full details can be found here http://blogs.we7.com/weblog/

We do not at this point in time expect to get rich overnight or come anywhere close to paying our bills with the money that we earn from giving away our music, but in our experience we have found that we earn more money quicker by making our music available free at We7 we do selling it on the download sites, and in my humble opinion I really feel that this is definitely one of the ways of the future because it is already to a certain extent what people have come to expect.