Type of business | Privately held company |
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Type of site
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Social networking service, music download, Streaming media, E-book |
Founded | April 2008 |
Headquarters | Nashville, TN, United States |
Area served | Worldwide |
Owner | Derek Webb |
Founder(s) | Derek Webb, Joe Kirk, Mark Nicholas, David McCollum, Brannon McAllister |
Employees | 22 |
Slogan(s) | Thousands of albums. Completely Free. Completely Legal |
Website | noisetrade |
Alexa rank | 25,771 (December 2015) |
Registration | E-mail and zip-code required download music |
Users | 1.3 million users (December 2015), 50,000 albums (Dec. 2015) |
Launched | April 2008 |
NoiseTrade is a global online audio and book Direct-to-fan distribution platform based in Nashville, TN, that enables its users to upload, their originally-created music and books and give away for free without digital rights management to anyone who provides at least an e-mail address and zip code. It was established by Derek Webb and artists he knew after he became one of the first major label artist to give his album away for free digitally on his website, where over 80,000 free copies of the album were downloaded. He then used the mailing address gathered in to book shows and after attendance at his shows had increased dramatically he decided other artists could benefit from the same idea of giving away music in exchange for location and contact information that may be more valuable than money made selling digital albums. Artists upload music with their free account, and then anyone can download ZIP files of mp3 and album art, only requiring an e-mail address and zip-code or country code for an opt-in newsletter from the artist, but optionally you may share using various social media or pay money to artists in the form of a tip-jar and the site takes a 20% cut for its costs and profit. Since its creation it has been constantly added features, many of which are common on other music streaming and music download websites, and has recently added books and other written media.