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Peter Haeder (Phaeder), moved from northern Germany to New Zealand two decades ago, quickly establishing himself here as a leading avant-garde guitarist and composer for film and TV. He is a prolific multi-instrumentalist, active in the world, dance, techno and drum 'n' bass styles of electronic music.

A long-time Buddhist, Phaeder has mastered deep voice singing, the esoteric one voice chord chant, now taught at just two monasteries in the world. To the amusement of the Tibetan Lamas, he has married this skill with his German electronic roots - plus Flamenco guitar and jazz.

The most recent result is an online-only album he has called'Phaeder EFJ', standing, naturally enough, for electro, Flamenco, jazz. 'EFJ' weaves together exquisitely crafted beats, guitar, singing and chanting in nine different languages, with his own electronica.

'EFJ' is my first digital online-only release, so I was quite nervous and excited to see how I might go about doing it and how it would work out. It turned out to be an invaluable experience which not only made me grow as a musician, but made me realise how the industry landscape has changed. This article focuses on the after-production events and techniques to get your music out there, rather than the actual production process.

In an article in the New York Times I read about a musician (somewhat more commercial than me), which explained how he goes about liaising directly with his 'friends', getting people to play guitar solos for him, and turns it all into a bit of a competition. This in turn generates more foot soldiers for him who not only buy his product, but are savvy and knowledgeable about the artist. They engage in promoting his music to other punters for him and even manage some of his online affairs like graphic design and fan clubs.

This is not dissimilar to MLM, or viral marketing, and is in essence old-fashioned word of mouth. One thing that crystallised for me is that we need to engage our audiences much more than we used to as musicians, no matter if it's through live gigs, online interaction or active participation in blogs, forums, chat rooms etc.

So I did the solo musician thing and wrote the music, produced it, mastered it, cut it to CD and MP3, created a bio, took some cool pictures and put a press kit together. These days you can go online and talk to a Down Beats editor directly via email (might not get you a review, but the third time around he'll remember your band).

Tip: I have a little USB flash key I carry around. It has my tracks, pics, press kit, reviews I collect, virtually everything I need to attack on the fly or give an interview or drop a track into someone's media player. It is a fantastic way to be organised and media ready. Bear in mind though that all of this takes preparation time and it is a good idea to make a things-to-do list of your tasks around each step of getting your music online.

Being in IT (my day job) and never more than a few feet away from a computational device, I can access the web, check email, update my ftp site (I use it a lot for DJs to download their tracks from), synchronise my files (geeky eh?) and check sales on various music websites. FTP stands for file transfer protocol, which is one of  the oldest and still widely used network protocols; its biggest advantage being very efficient transfer of data and data files in any format. Most websites come with ftp as an option, so when choosing a web host make sure you do choose that.

I have around two dozen music source websites in my Outlook folders, all of which I hooked into and checked out, to find that there are a small number of generic models, which all of the cyber shops use with little variation. The likes of Broadjam give you a little space and let you upload a few tracks and than charge like a wounded bull for anything else - but they do offer web hosting and will peddle your tracks to TV and film (for a price, lol). There are a number of up and coming music sites which offer greater flexibility and web space for the musician, and the cut they take varies from anywhere between 20% and 50% of the sales made online.

I figure on iTunes, for example, if every second or third click leads to a sale one should make around eight hard bucks for every 24 hour period or so. Here in the homeland we are lucky to have amplifier.co.nz. These guys are astute, love music and have their chops down. Within a couple of days of contacting them I had a promo on amplifier for my previous albums ('Lotus Beat', 'Emerald' and 'Singularity') and the orders came in. They also have charts and do both physical and digital distribution, which is what most online stores do.