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If there's any one obstacle indie band members face in launching their music careers, it's finding a way to promote their music on a penny-pinching budget. Hey, they're not called "starving artists" for nothing. Between paying that outrageous bill for a couple of disappointing recording sessions and scraping pennies to afford the cost of producing CD's and album covers, there's not much left over to put towards their food, let alone their music promotion. So that raises the question, was all the stress really worth it? If nobody knows about a band's music, did they just waste all of their time and money on stress and production costs? There must be a better way.

Well, there is. The entire world is an entertainment-hungry beast, and when it comes to music, it loves whatever's new and hip, even if it sounds like garbage. So up and coming bands can give the entire world exactly what it wants and make a killing by doing so. How? By promoting their music the FREE way.

Sometimes the answers to our problems are staring us right in the face, poised to bite us on the nose. For an artist on the prowl for cheap promotion, one of those answers is YouTube. The proof is in the views. I challenge you to visit YouTube.com and type "guitar" or "guitar solo" into the search bar. What is the first upload you see? The video featuring a teenage boy hunched over an electric guitar plucking out "Canon in D" in pumped rock opera style. And how many views did this guy earn? OVER 18 MILLION! Over 130,000 viewers have chosen his video as a favorite, and, gauging by the comment board, over 51,000 YouTubers have taken note of his playing ability and are BEGGING to see more of his work. This isn't even a song he wrote! This piece was written over 300 years ago by some dude named Pachelbel. People usually play it at weddings; they didn't consider it to be entertainment until this kid came around. But they still don't pop it into their stereos and jam to it in the car. They can't, because it's a video on YouTube.

But what if this kid had really been thinking, and decided to make a CD? Suppose the other ten songs he produced for the CD were a total waste; customers would still purchase it for the sole reason that they wanted a portable version of this amazing masterpiece. And what would this guy have paid for his advertising? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING! Assuming that he had at least a one-page website (which most bands do), he could have directed traffic right to the purchase page! Even if only ONE

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