Keeping control

David Guetta maintains his ownership rights by marketing his own music.

In the modern world of digital downloads and desktop music publishing, it can be difficult for an artist to know how to best market his work. Electronic artist David Guetta has found an interesting solution—he is using Facebook to control the distribution of his new album Nothing But The Beat. And he charges more for it there than he does on iTunes.

In an interview on YouTube he talks about the making of the album, which includes several different singers who created original songs to go with his dance beats. Artists such as Ludacris, Akon, will.i.am and more famous names are all featured on different tracks. As Guetta notes in the interview, “When you work with such great artists, life is easy!” With over 20 million people liking his page, selling the work on Facebook should be easy, too!

But then again, maybe not, as Pete Cashmore points out. Cashmore writes for Mashable, a popular technology blog. While he believes that selling music on Facebook is a viable option (and giving it away even more so) he notes that he has been wrong about Facebook before. In this case, it is possible that the record companies might get involved and put a stop to free streaming. They most likely won’t, however, stop artists from selling their own material.

There are many platforms available for selling music. It remains to be seen how well each of them preforms. For David Guetta, however, it hardly matters. No matter what platform, the DJ remains number one his native France, according to the website Charts in France. And he is moving up elsewhere, as well, having gone gold in Australia. One thing is for certain: using all the available platforms is good advice for artists at any level of their career.