After you have recorded your song, have it mixed and mastered the next thing you will need to do is have your music in places for them to buy it. So how do you do that when you live outside the USA or don’t have a distributor? I look to answer that question in today’s post.
Being outside the United States, or Europe, in order to get your music into music stores, you need a distributor. There are various distributors that you can get access to. You can use, eg. VP Records, Universal Records and such like. These entities have distributors, and their job is to get the music into stores.That may be the physical or digital format.
Independently as an artist, you can’t get direct access to let’s say iTunes. To do so, you’ll need an aggregator. The aggregator is to see to it that you meet the criteria for the music distribution. eg. they make sure the song title is ok, and so on, and then get the music to the stores.
Here are some aggregator options:
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cdbaby
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Tunecore
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Routenote
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Distrokid
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ReverbNation
Personal Experience with some aggregator
TuneCore
Tunecore cost 29 to start per album. $9 per single and a yearly subscription 49.99 and no fees are deducted. Additionally, your music is put up on iTunes within 24hrs. The disadvantage to this arrangement comes if you earn less than $50 for the year, it can prove very costly due to the yearly subscription
Cdbaby
Cdbaby costs approximately $49 to have your music up on iTunes.You pay this fee once on subscription. There is, however, a percentage deduction hereafter.
Routenote
Route note will have you put up your music charge free. That’s if you sign up for the free option.15% is however taken after sales. To get all sales proceeds, you may sign up for the premium option, at an approximate cost of $49
Distrokid
You pay $19 per year, and upload as much music as you like. ie: Distrokid is the best option. Besides that, if just starting out as an independent artist without money, you may use RouteNote. Over time as you build your career, you may transition to the other services such as Distrokid, as it would be the most cost-effective, compared to the others.
Analytics for DistroKid is real time. You can see purchases before payout. The same can be said for TuneCore, though more costly.
The Overall Basics to Getting Started
1. High-resolution album artwork size and specifications are given and must be a square and should not include costing and other details.
2. Track Title
Name of each track is written by the given specifications and featured artist, are also written in like format.
3. Upload music
specifications:
TuneCore- WAV files
RouteNote and Distrokid High-quality 320kb mp3 or wave