How to Start a Movie and Music Download Website

By Contributing Writer

Updated July 21, 2017

The Internet's accessibility, ubiquity and speed continues to skyrocket. As a result, savvy Internet users desire increasingly rich content, including multimedia audio and video. The popularity of online brands offering music and movie downloads, such as Youtube and iTunes, has many webmasters seeking a piece of the action.

Plan a model for your website by asking yourself important questions about its design and purpose. Do you want your site to cater to particular demographic and community, or will it be more general like Youtube? Do you want to host user-made videos and copyright-free music at your website, or do you plan to distribute copyrighted material in exchange for a fee? If you choose the latter, you’ll need to acquire the appropriate licenses and strike deals with content copyright holders.

Choose a web hosting company. This will allow your web site to have an online presence, complete with its own URL. Yahoo! Small Business offers web hosting packages for as little as $10 per month. This includes unlimited data transfer, disk space, audio and video galleries, and web design tools, all of which will be necessary for a movie and music download site.

Consider choosing an alternative, purpose-specific web hosting site, such as Fliggo. Fliggo is a free web hosting agency that will allow you to create a video hosting site without any technical knowledge of web design. At this time, Fliggo is free. Unfortunately, the level of customization involved with a method like this is rather limited, and you won’t be able to run a for-pay site. This will, however, allow you to test the Internet waters and find a market before taking the plunge with a custom site.

Hire a team of skilled individuals to help with the development and day-to-day operations of your website. You’ll need web designers, content creators, marketing experts, moderators and probably a legal specialist. Unless your consider yourself to be a “jack of all trades” with an unlimited amount of free time, starting a movie and music download site by yourself will be overwhelming.

Build an online community around your website. One of the biggest problems facing Internet startups is a lack of traffic. The Internet is flooded with music and movie download websites, and your site will need unique features, excellent design and interesting content in order to stand out. Find other websites catering to your chosen market and demographic, and purchase advertising.

Tips

Don’t expect your site to be an overnight sensation. It will take time and hard work to make your online presence known.

Warnings

Be absolutely sure to deal with copyrighted material appropriately. Hosting copyrighted music and movies –whether you choose to charge users for them or not –without the necessary licenses is not an option.

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