Are you a musician wanting to self distribute your music? This tutorial will help you set up an attractive audio player on your website, with a ‘buy’ button next to each track so customers can purchase your digital music.  Customers will automatically be sent the music track once they have successfully completed checkout using PayPal or Credit Card.

What you need:

• WordPress website
• HTML5 jQuery Audio Plugin
• PayPal account (business or premiere)
• FetchApp Account

Step 1 – set up the audio player

• Install HTML5 jQuery Audio player plugin on your WordPress site.
• Upload your playlist/s and get the music player displaying how you want it on your site.
• On Display Settings screen set ‘Show Buy Text’ to YES and in the field below set the text you want to display (eg BUY)

Step 2 – setup FetchApp for digital delivery of your music files

• Sign up (or sign in) to your FetchApp account
• Configure General Settings via Settings > General Settings (this is stuff like currency, business name, download expiry settings)
• Configure Cart Setup & API via Settings > Cart Setup & API.  Important: On this screen you need to activate PayPal as the checkout method. To do this just fill in your PayPal ID and click ‘activate’ on the right.
• Now go to Products and click ‘Add New Product’ to add the first music track that you want to sell.
• Once you’ve created a product successfully, click ‘Sell Product’ button on the right – this takes you to a screen showing various button codes…
• Scroll down to the Buy Now Button code and copy the direct link which is shown to the right of the orange button.
• Jump back to your WordPress site and Paste the link into the ‘Link Buy Text’ field for the music track.
• Save… then test. Clicking ‘buy’ next to the track should direct the user to PayPal where they can complete the transaction, resulting in delivery of the music track.
• Assuming it worked, apply the same process for each music track you wish to sell.

Helpful Notes (hopefully!)

• FetchApp is a standalone web application for sales/delivery of digital products. This makes it perfect for music files.
• You get 1MB of space for free with FetchApp (so you can test it or suitable if you just have one file to sell), but please be aware that if you have a bunch of music tracks you’ll probably need a paid plan > see plans and pricing here.
• Consider turning on the option for customers to use Credit Card without having a PayPal account… you can do this via your PayPal account itself.

Found this tutorial helpful? Feedback and comments welcome.