Here in Hollywood, you can’t walk to any of the major shopping or entertainment areas without being bombarded by a handful of musicians attempting to sell you their burned CD’s. It has been this way for a while, but in this day and age, I have to wonder why they still exist… and why they haven’t figured out that spending an hour putting their stuff on the internet will reap more rewards than standing out on the street corner for a solid month.

First off, let’s look at the way they try to get you to buy them. Most of the time, the artist attempting to sell you a CD hands it to you, implying that it is free, perhaps a sampler or something. Only once you take the disc handed to you (and why wouldn’t you, if you were a tourist or did not know any better) does the artist then ask for his $5-10. It is misleading, annoying, and dishonest.

(As a side note, if the musician were to actually be handing out a free CD with a couple tracks and perhaps a link to his MySpace page where you could buy the rest, that would actually work rather well.)

But beyond all that, why are they out here peddling CD’s in the first place when they can put their music up online for free, and build up an audience that way?

Yes, I know, building an audience is never easy. But online, the costs are lower, the stakes are lower, and the potential is way, way, way higher.

Last night, I uploaded about 13 images to Flickr. Before I had even given them names and descriptions, they had already gotten a handful of views, solely because they were just uploaded and Flickr shows users the most recently uploaded photos. Just by putting something online, you are probably guaranteed more eyes or ears per day than you would if you were sitting on Hollywood Blvd with a stack of CD-R’s.

And then we get to the issue of targeting. If you are simply handing your album to anyone who walks by, just the probability of merely finding someone into your genre of music is low. When your stuff is online, tagged and categorized for all, it is very likely that your listeners enjoy your music, or at least are interested in your style or genre, rather than random.

I’m not even going to cover all the different social sharing aspects of putting your work online, because those have been beaten to death already. Suffice to say, there are many rewards to be had for putting your art on the internet.

Lastly, there is the issue of time. Putting your music on MySpace takes almost no time at all, and you only have to do the hard work once. As long as you update it every once in a while, maintain a presence, and be good about keeping in contact with fans or people who send you message, you’re probably doing the best job you can at getting noticed. Or at the very least, it will still exceed any attempts you might make attempting to peddle the discs you popped out of your MacBook last night on the busy streets of Los Angeles.

The bottom line: There is absolutely no situation I can imagine where sitting outside trying to sell your CD-R’s is a better way to market your music, in terms of efficiency, time, money, audience, or any other measure of success by which you wish to judge your marketing attempts. There could be some creative ways to do both (such as my idea at the beginning, about giving away free CD samplers with links to the rest of your music) but by itself, CD peddling is no longer effective.

But then again, was it ever even very effective, even before the internet?