A free site to host a few recorded songs?

[Dpoirier]

Hi y'all,

I'm helping out a female artist and she would like to be able to upload a few songs onto a free hosting site and just send out links for people to hear them. She wants to avoid sending MP3 files (wants to retain control of distribution) and would prefer if people would not be able to download her files. I explained to her that if someone really wanted it, it's super easy to record the audio on your computer or use media downloaders... but she'd still prefer to make it "less probable" to be simply downloaded.

So here I am tapping the collective wisdom. Is there a free hosting site with "player" features for audio files? Or any other creative solution?

Thanks in advance

 

[alan.thomas]

No. There are free static hosting like github pages or cloudlare, but since you have those requirements you'd need a backend to obfuscate those files. Backend hosting is not free but something like a DO droplet is not too expensive. Of course you need to develop the backend

 

[alan.thomas]

But maybe bandcamp would be good enough ?

 

[Chromatizm]

Is there a free hosting site with "player" features for audio files?

Soundcloud
That how Billie Eilish started the career

 

[mr_fender]

+1 to Soundcloud. Their player embeds nicely into threads here on the forum when you post a link. It's free for up to 2 hours of music uploads and you retain all rights to the uploaded audio.

 

[AtomicJeff]

Soundcloud. Up to 3 hrs of content is free.

 

[Budda]

Soundcloud for free, bandcamp if they want the opportunity to get paid.

 

[iaresee]

If you don't need to add anything but the tracks: SoundCloud works. If you need a little bio stuff, maybe Bandcamp? If you want to go full custom site, you can go pretty far with a Github pages site and a custom domain. You'll need to pay for the custom domain though.

https://crawlspacenh.com and https://mostlywrong.net are both Github pages sites fwiw. The content is all available in git repos if you want to view how they're setup.

You can host some amount of song content, though it's not the easiest. AI actually does a pretty good job of managing Github pages now though, but again: that would be a cost, not free.

Here's a page with an embedded audio file: https://mostlywrong.net/space-junk/

And the source behind it: https://github.com/ianchesal/ianchesal.github.io/blob/master/_posts/2021-04-03-space-junk.md

 

[iaresee]

but she'd still prefer to make it "less probable" to be simply downloaded.

Anything on the internet can be downloaded, it's just a matter of will and saviness. She needs to get over this. Her music is likely not that precious.

 

[Intimo]

@Dpoirier Try Boombox - https://boombox.io/

https://boombox.io/security-promise/

 

[Dpoirier]

Thanks everyone!