sharke
The trouble with Bandpage, Soundcloud and all these other stream-your-own-music sites is that they stream at a rather disappointing 128kbps (MP3), which is how things used to be in the bad old days when iTunes first started. So you're not really showing your music in its best light. I'm always surprised that so many people on music sites like this are asking for critiques of their mixes uploaded on Soundcloud - the quality ain't that great.
To be honest I think the best way to promote your music and make tracks available for streaming is via your own blog (plenty of free blog hosting sites and templates) with YouTube videos embedded in them. YouTube is pretty much the highest quality audio of them all - as long as you upload the video at 720p or higher, the audio bit rate is 192kbps AND it's AAC compression which is higher quality than MP3 to start with. It's very easy to make a video out of a track using Windows Movie Maker, and uploading to YouTube is quite fast these days too.
Yes, like I said, I would prefer to upload directly (for example; 320kbps audio) without having to use SoundCloud - as someone else pointed out
here.
And you're right, better off using YouTube. But as for Bandpage integration; from what I've read, there's been issues with some users, read about it
here and
here Yes, it would be better to embed YouTube directly on ones own site(s) and for that Bandpage is definitely not required although Bandpage's main benefit is the convenience of managing all content across multiple site thru one application but if issues 'may' occur then I be better off not having Bandpage. A little searching will find free iTune Store apps that can be added to the music page on Facebook.
I also like the fact that YouTube can easily be
shared which is a great marketing tool AND if the video is distributed professionally for example;
MondoTunes Video Distribution you can actually earn money (paid for every stream/view) and the video gets distributed to a lot of popular sites such as; YouTube, Vevo, GoTV, Amazon Video On Demand and many more.
I've noticed a lot of bands including major labels use a still-image for their music videos (online) on sites such as, YouTube and Vevo. But for TV broadcast versions, obviously require a professionally well produced music video.
The other advantage with Music Video is, a lot of music magazines (music news) sites such as
MNE will embed videos on their site and a lot of the music videos are from YouTube.