LabRat Posted December 2, 2019 Share Posted December 2, 2019 This is a quick how-to submitting music to Spotify, Apple Music and other streaming and online music services. Uploading music to streaming platforms or online music stores without a record label is quite simple. All you need is some 3rd party involvement, I guess commonly known as distributers. Most of these distribution services offer something slightly different. I'm not going to go through all of them and what they do, that's something you can do the research on but I'll put down links of a few of the commonly used ones. By submitting your music to these platforms, they take care or all the little business things the labels would have to do (paying royalties, licensing and monetisation, and above all else the distribution). The good thing about going independent is you take total control of your works and you retain 100% of your intellectual property rights, meaning you own everything which I feel is very important. Record labels take the IP rights from you making your music their asset. In exchange, they're supposed to invest in you as an artist but it can go either way. Whatever happens, whether you become famous or not, they still own your works for along as the contract states and if you were to part ways from the label you'll then need to seek permission to perform the music that you wrote. Artists big and small fall into this trap all the time. Kesha and Taylor Swift are prefect examples of artists struggling to claim royalties or performance licensing because of record labels refusing to cooperate. Below are 3 commonly used services; https://cdbaby.com CD Baby is a popular service that gets your music just about everywhere and they're a pay-as-you-go service. They have a bunch of stuff they can do for you like mastering and production of physical copies, CD's etc. As far as the royalties go, you get 91% paid to you. https://distrokid.com I use distrokid for my submissions. They're subscription based with a limited number of artists you can distribute under, so if you wanted to set up a little label I guess you could do that through distrokid and have up to 5 different artists. It's a super easy process to submit music and the dashboard is nice and clean to navigate so you can keep track of your releases and make changes to them whenever you like. Distrokid pay 100% of the royalties to you. They're currently beta testing submissions to Beatport so if that's going to be your primary source of output I'd suggest looking elsewhere. https://www.tunecore.com I think TuneCore is a pay-as-you-go service too and I believe you also collect 100% of the royalties. I haven't done too much research about whether they submit to Beatport so you'll have to have a look. It's not a service I looked too much into, even just scraping the surface of their website didn't tell me too much. I know it's all super bland but everyone's needs are going to be different but hopefully the 3 above give you that little bit of a head start. There are many more that offer lots of different things. If anyone has any further questions I'll be happy to try assist where I can Mitch, BeatLeSS and Cupe 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mitch Posted December 3, 2019 Share Posted December 3, 2019 Brilliant article! LabRat 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cupe Posted December 3, 2019 Share Posted December 3, 2019 This is awesome, thanks for taking the time to write this up chief. Does it end up getting expensive for a heap of tracks? LabRat 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LabRat Posted December 3, 2019 Author Share Posted December 3, 2019 26 minutes ago, Cupe said: This is awesome, thanks for taking the time to write this up chief. Does it end up getting expensive for a heap of tracks? No worries. This is why I chose to submit with distrokid using their subscription based service. For the cost per year (which is around 60-70 bucks) I can upload as many tracks as I like. If you choose not to renew, you can pay extra fees on your tracks so they'll remain on these stores for life, otherwise just keep subscribing. If you got a massive catalog of tunes it's really helpful to just keep uploading throughout the year. There's a few extra fees, like submitting to Shazam for example which is only a few bucks, but distrokid just makes it super easy (for me anyway) knowing you can log on, upload and 4 or 5 weeks later your track is released. It's recommended you give a minimum of 4 weeks notice too. Some stores take longer to submit to than others. Cupe 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cupe Posted December 3, 2019 Share Posted December 3, 2019 Ok cool. I might give it a shot soon. LabRat 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ValveAudio Posted February 22, 2020 Share Posted February 22, 2020 These ones are the most popular? The amount of these services online is overwhelming and there are some pretty big differences between them... still trying to figure out wich one to use and why. 😵 Cupe 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LabRat Posted February 25, 2020 Author Share Posted February 25, 2020 On 22/02/2020 at 4:07 PM, ValveAudio said: These ones are the most popular? The amount of these services online is overwhelming and there are some pretty big differences between them... still trying to figure out wich one to use and why. 😵 Commonly used services Cupe 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cupe Posted February 25, 2020 Share Posted February 25, 2020 lol fucking faggot bots Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LabRat Posted February 25, 2020 Author Share Posted February 25, 2020 15 hours ago, Cupe said: lol fucking faggot bots This one seems better than the last few haha Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cupe Posted February 26, 2020 Share Posted February 26, 2020 1 hour ago, LabRat said: This one seems better than the last few haha Yeah I removed the spam links in its sig. Wouldn't mind a few bots like this bumping threads around town tbh LabRat 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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