h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I've had a pretty productive spell lately songwriting. I want to get my songs heard but have a key problem: I really don't have any spare cash to splash out on getting demos done etc. I don't play any instruments and I record my ideas by singing them into a dictaphone. Any clever ideas out there on how I can get people hearing my songs?

YouTube is a popular format these days if you can upgrade from audio to video recordings of yourself. There are also web-sites which are more specifically used for linking musicians of various sorts with each other. You may need to be able to produce WAV and MP3 files for uploading to those.

YouTube is something I'm thinking about.

"if you can upgrade from audio to video recordings of yourself"

For that I will need an "expert": that is, someone who can do more on a PC than switching it on and off.

"There are also web-sites which are more specifically used for linking musicians"

Can you give an example of such a site, or maybe suggest a suitable Google search?

> "Can you give an example of such a site"

I've had to search back through some previous posts because I never bothered to memorise any of the places (nor use them myself). I did recall one was something relatively famous and not necessarily thought of by other people as having a music connection, but that still took a long time to find! It turned out to be MySpace. There's also a forum used by another poster:

http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/

I used to work in a recording studio and on Sunday afternoons we'd get these groups of kids who'd book the studio with an idea to "do techno." They didn't have anything other than a list of what they'd wear at their first gig. The music was my job. I'd start to work while they discussed tracksuits. Once, a girlfriend of a band member was the only one interested in what was going on in the track. After their 3 hours they'd take what I'd done around the corner to the local radio station, which had a techno show on Sunday nights and it'd be played, they'd secure a gig from it and everybody was happy.

They were doing what plenty of others such as Madonna and Malcolm McLaren have done: get hired help in to do the bits they couldn't. I wish I'd had the smarts to do that when I was 15.

So, hire a recording studio and get a programmer/engineer to do all the technical hoohah for you.