THE MUZIK-ZONE
A Look At The Online Music Outlets - BetaRecords
Ease of use: - Features:

The website doesn't always respond and it's spotty when uploading audio and video tracks. It has lots of potential and a lot of features, most of them still in the beta testing stage. It's a relatively new site and so I hope it improves with time.

PRO:
You can assign up to three genres to a track, which is nice. You can create groups (called tribes), create ringtones (another potential revenue source!), add a photo section, friends, favorites, messages show schedules, a blog and even a store where you can get 85% of the gross income from sales (plus 5% of any sales made through your "recommended" choices).

You have varied choices for sales. You can start out charging 10 cents per song and let the price go up (to 99-cents) as it becomes more popular, or you can charge 99 cents from the get-go.

CON:
The process of adding tracks to the upload list and assigning genres is very slow and tedious. You have to go to a list (they use sow-loading banners when a simple list would work just as well), click the appropriate banner, then click a sub-genre, then go back and repeat the process up to three times.

On uploads you may frequently get an error page filled with code that looks to the non-programmer like gobbledy-gook. However, the upload usually "takes" anyway if you come back and check later. Also, often when you press SELECT after picking your genres, you'll find nothing happens and you have to start all over. Nor can you seem to re-order your song list.

On videos, I've found the player works very poorly unless you know a work-around. It plays about 1 second of video, then jumps to someone else's video. In my case, it almost always jumps to a video by Joe Dansereau, a friend of mine from many years back. The work around is to get out of the edit mode and go to your home page just like a regular visitor and view the video from there.

The site has no HELP section, forum or FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions) section, so you're on your own.

RECOMMENDATIONS:
Go through the Genres list and carefully pick out your choices (up to 3) BEFORE you start uploading songs. If you have a lot to upload, it will soon become a monotonous, mechanical routine - down three - click - down 4 - click - go back, etc., etc.

They offer an "enhanced" track for $20 each, but I'd forego this. DO your mixing BEFORE you upload, get rid of pops, clicks, whistles, background 60-herts hum, etc. No need to pay $20 per song for them to do it.