Getting your music out can be tough. Before the Internet you could give some good looking groupies a few bucks to give out your demo on the sidewalk, but those times are long gone. People no longer go outside, and if they do, they don’t lift their eyes from their iPod or take those damn white, terrible sounding headphones out of their ears.

So what’s a musician gotta do to get some attention around here? I’ve scoured the Internet looking for a few good places to plaster your music and your name. Some you might know, some you might not—here we’re going beyond MySpace and trying to make your tunes as ubiquitous as possible.

Last.fm

Last.fm doesn’t just track your listening habits. Artists can sign up with the site and upload tracks, pictures, biographies and show dates. Because Last.fm is all about finding new music, the audience is targeted and it’s also easy to find specific users who will be interested in the genre you’re producing. No spamming, though!

Jamendo

While Jamendo probably should’ve hired me to edit their copy before going live, here’s another site allowing artists to upload music under a Creative Commons license so that fans can trial your material and decide whether or not to get into it.

GarageBand

GarageBand lets you upload MP3s, develop a band profile, and promote your shows. You can also sell albums on CD or MP3. This is a particularly popular site with heaps of users, but plenty of competition from other musicians (unlike Last.fm which is more popular but has a better user:artist ratio).

ArtistServer

ArtistServer is an MP3 community that allows artists to upload five songs on a free account, or 300 on a $40 per year paid account. On a free account you’re also limited to bit rates of 96 or 128, so you’ll have to downgrade your higher quality files.

Amie Street

Amie Street allows artists to sell or give away their music. It’s free to sign up and begin selling, but the first $5 each song earns plus 30% of overall revenue is pocketed by the site—the initial $5 is to cover bandwidth and administration per song. You get 70% of sales revenue back.

MetalHordes

MetalHordes is a genre-specific site, which unfortunately there aren’t a heap of—having a targeted audience is great! If you play any kind of metal this is the site for your band. I’d love to hear about more genre specific sites like this one—drop us a tip in the comments!

MP3.com

The web giant MP3.com still allows bands to sign up for free and upload up to 100mb worth of music and 10mb worth of band images. And, something that seemed kind of odd to me, unlimited space for an unlimited number of music videos.

purevolume

purevolume is not only yet another popular site for promoting your stuff, but a name that insists on tripping up my computer’s autocorrect capitalization. If autocorrect woes aren’t enough to keep you away, check out this site for the usual gamut: bios, pics, streaming music, and so on.

SoundClick

SoundClick is pretty generous: once you’re approved by the site, you can upload unlimited songs to your artist page and MP3 store. It’s a nice change from the many sites that place pretty strict limits on how much you can upload. You also get the usual upcoming shows promotion.

Muzic

Muzic is a service for artists with free MP3 hosting and profile pages. They also talk about something called a “songcard” for each song, which basically puts your song in a Flash player with a description and picture.

TuneShout

TuneShout is a site that lets you upload your music and choose whether to give it away or sell it. It also offers embed code for your songs so you can promote your music on other Web sites. The only thing that irked me was the wording of the about page, touting the fact that artists retain copyright of their songs as a feature, rather than an expected given. Good thing to mention, bad way to do it.

MySpace

This list wouldn’t be complete without some classics, the first of which is MySpace. MySpace is annoying. Very annoying. But you can build a big following fairly quickly here and interact more freely with your fans—the benefits of fusing social network with music, as opposed to some of the other sites listed here.

Facebook

It surprised me to find out that a lot of people don’t realize Facebook offers pages for artists. You can upload your music and make friends and fans. It’s kind of like MySpace, without the headaches and strobe lights.

Lulu

Did you know the popular print on demand publisher sells MP3s too? Lulu allows artists to upload music and sell it at a price of their choosing, with Lulu tacking their percentage cut on top. While you’re at it, you can set up a print on demand CD album, too. Some people still buy CDs, believe it or not!

Bebo

Bebo is basically the same thing as MySpace; different site, fewer users. Same teeny-bopper demographic for the most part, from what I can tell, which is good because they latch onto new music and artists and bad because they don’t have a credit card.

Download.com

Download.com is best known for offering a shareware or demo version of just about every application, game or tangible object in the world. It also has a Music section, which is lesser known but open to artists who want to upload their music, bio and photos to a Download.com profile.