Digital Distribution
Uploading your music to online stores should be a key part of any musician’s approach to getting heard and selling records. Hollin Jones lifts the lid on digital distribution.
Technology has been changing the way musicians work for centuries. First it was the wax cylinder, then radio, then the advent of the synthesizer and the drum machine. A little later, MIDI, hard disk recording and workstations came along and finally, the unstoppable rise of the computer and the DAW as a do-everything studio sealed the place of technology in the music production world.
One recent phenomenon has been the rise of digital music – or, more accurately, digital music files. CDs are digital, but they didn’t enable bands and artists to cut out record labels (quite the opposite, some may argue, since they were so costly to manufacture). While you could burn your own CD-Rs and sell them at gigs along with cassettes, as a strategy it was never going to lead many people to worldwide fame. It took the rapid growth of the internet and widespread adoption of broadband to really change things.
Compressed digital music files have been around for a while now, although for a number of years they were viewed as more of a problem than a solution by the music industry due to their popularity with file sharers. Apple was one of the first big names to encourage people to digitise their CD collection way back in 1999 with its ‘Rip, Mix, Burn’ campaign, though, like the rest of the industry, it couldn’t have foreseen how quickly the mp3 would become freely traded around the internet on sites such as Napster and Audiogalaxy, now long since relaunched as legitimate commercial companies.
While others struggled to monetise digital music, Apple finally cracked it with the iTunes Store in 2003. For a number of years, record labels insisted that music files be DRM-protected to prevent copying, but even a keen amateur could easily get around this with a little thought, so eventually it was dropped industry-wide and is now pretty much a thing of the past.
The rise of digital stores
Thanks to the success of the iPod and an easy-to-use interface, the iTunes store was wildly successful and Apple was able to get most of the big record labels onboard, making iTunes the obvious place to go for digital music. At the other end of the scale, individuals and small labels could submit their music to iTunes, although the process was tortuous; in time, companies sprang up that offered to do this for you, using their established links with Apple to streamline and sometimes even automate the process. At the same time, other online stores were springing up: companies such as Amazon, 7Digital, Napster, eMusic, Rhapsody and many more, all offering something slightly different to the customer.
For musicians wanting to sell their music online, trying to manually submit your tracks to all of these stores isn’t a realistic proposition, so distribution companies like TuneCore, Ditto Music, CDBaby and others have gradually listed more and more stores in their inventory. If you choose a distributor and do the relevant uploading now, you can get your tracks into 30 or 40 different digital stores and, crucially, the distributors generally provide a single point of revenue collection as well, which is a great help. You’ll also receive purchasing reports which, while rather dull on the face of it, tell you important things such as which countries your music is most popular in, making targeted promotion more effective. Most services either charge a fee but don’t take a cut of royalties or don’t charge a fee but do take a cut.
Worldwide distribution
It’s an obvious point to make, but selling your music online makes it available worldwide to anyone with an internet connection, a mobile phone, a PayPal account or a credit card. Just a couple of decades ago you would have needed the help of a decent-size record company to sell music around the world, as music was in those days restricted to physical products like CDs and vinyl. And since the removal of DRM, people can play the tracks they download on a number of devices, making them more likely to buy them in the first place.
From the point of view of a small record label or an individual, therefore, the rise of digital distribution has been nothing short of revolutionary. Not only does the mechanism more or less manage itself once the material is uploaded, there are no postal costs and no storage or manufacturing costs. Releasing something is no longer a case of agonising over whether it’s worth spending hundreds of pounds to do a CD run (though CDs do still sell well) but rather a one-shot, inexpensive process.
There are other benefits, too, such as many radio stations having a budget specifically to buy new music online so you don’t have to post CDs to them, or digital DJs being able to download your tracks instantly to their laptop at a gig if the mood takes them.
A quick web search will reveal tens, perhaps even hundreds of sites offering to distribute your music online, all with slightly different fees and procedures for doing things. It’s impossible to look at them all, but there are some well-known ones that are widely used and while they sometimes differ in emphasis, there will certainly be one that suits your needs.
TuneCore is web-based and has a very friendly and uncluttered interface, charging a setup fee per album or single but taking no cut of your profits from sales. As with many distributors, you upload your material in uncompressed format like WAV or AIFF and add the relevant text and artwork. Then you choose which stores to send it to and when all is confirmed and paid for, TuneCore will perform all the necessary encoding. It’s then sent off to the various stores and gradually goes live in the following days and weeks.
At this level it’s tough to specify a release date – and you will pay more for this as it entails more work on the distributor’s part. In this writer’s experience, Amazon tends to be very quick to get music up and iTunes is perhaps the slowest, though it’s still pretty quick. Again, as with most of these services, with TuneCore you get to keep all your rights, so you’re not signing anything away. It’s worth knowing that it can be very difficult to edit or change albums after they have been sent, so it’s vital to get it absolutely right before you commit.
CDBaby started off distributing CDs for small labels and independent artists and it still does this, though it has added digital distribution to the services it offers. For around $35 per album or $9 per single you can upload your tracks or post them a CD, choose the stores you want to sell on from a good selection available and you’re off. They do keep a percentage of your sales (currently 25% of the purchase price of digital downloads from their website and 9% from all other sites), but CDBaby is a well-known and much-used site for people on the lookout for new and interesting music. As a result, you’re probably more likely to attract interest, especially from the USA, where the company is based. If you make it into the featured section for whatever style of music you work in, it’s not unheard of to be picked up by small labels and publishers who look there for new acts.
Shop till you drop
There are many other sites that offer a straightforward uploading and distribution service, all of which are worth a look. ReverbNation is one: it offers two packages, a basic one at $34.95 per year with 29 stores and a Pro package for $59.95 with 39 stores. It doesn’t take a percentage of your sales but does offer sales reports and a good selection of stores. It integrates well with Facebook – potentially a key advantage in the current climate – and like some other distributors, provides tools to promote and market your music as well as just getting it out into the ether.
Songcastmusic.com is not entirely dissimilar, with a setup fee and a $5.99 monthly fee but no contract and free barcodes, which some companies charge extra for. They don’t take a cut of royalties, either.
Dittomusic.com claims to deliver to over 500 online stores and charges 30p per track per store, also offering chart eligibility, albeit at extra cost. Beatport is a more specialised store that caters for electronic music, but it seems you have to be affiliated with a record label to get your music into the store and the company doesn’t necessarily accept every album submitted. Djdownload.com and Traxsource are the two main rivals to Beatport and also worth a look.
Best of the rest
In addition to uploading your material to a ‘traditional’ digital music store, there are a number of sites and services that have a slightly different focus and might be more suited to your needs. 7Digital runs the Indiestore, where you can create a profile page and get several free tracks uploaded and set the price yourself, creating a widget and embedding it anywhere you like on the web. It’s perhaps worth mentioning that the company also offers services to record labels, such as the ability to integrate the 7Digital platform into artist websites, essentially giving you your own customised store with much more flexibility than you would get by using a bigger, catch-all store like iTunes or Amazon.
Bandcamp.com is an interesting recent arrival on the scene and is one of the most flexible online music sales services currently around from a musician’s point of view. Their website has all the details, but essentially you create an account, upload uncompressed tracks to complete your albums or EPs, add artwork and various other data, then set the price. You can make things free, charge a set price or let users pay what they want, specifying a minimum amount if you like. Best of all, the downloads come in loads of different formats, from obscure Ogg Vorbis files through high bit-rate mp3s all the way up to FLAC and Apple Lossless, so audiophiles are well catered for. Amazingly, Bandcamp doesn’t charge a fee or take a cut, and the site isn’t weighed down with adverts. They haven’t ruled out taking a cut in the future, but at the moment it’s a free service, with advanced listener, location and sales stats for your enjoyment as well.
Soundcloud.com isn’t exactly a store, but it does do distribution rather well, providing a single location for you to upload high-quality versions of tracks then post them on various different sites for playback or download, plus links to buy the track elsewhere.
Standing somewhat alone in the sense that it isn’t browser-based is Rebeat, an app that lets you manage more of the distribution process than other sites.
Finally, there are still also the old stalwarts MySpace and Facebook, both offering music players and other tools for musicians, though they are really better for promotion than for actually selling music online. The most common way to sell music through them would be to embed a widget from another store into your page, which is simple enough to do.
Sell, sell, sell!
It’s never been easier to distribute your music online, though when it comes to getting noticed and selling music, you still need the whole package of promotion, gigging, radio plugging and a good deal of luck. That’s a whole other series of features in itself… nonetheless, it’s amazing to realise that you can upload an album from your bedroom in Birmingham and a couple of weeks later it can be bought by fans as far afield as Brazil, Burma or Belgium.
There are caveats, of course – most stores will reject material that’s poorly recorded or that infringes copyright in some way, and some pricing deals are better than others. So do read all terms and conditions carefully before you sign (or upload) anything. On the plus side, though, hardly any stores will try to take ownership of your rights, as indeed they shouldn’t, and collecting revenue is usually straightforward enough, generally handled through PayPal or a similar service. So the world of digitally distributed music is no more of a minefield than the traditional music industry always was!
Some services offer streaming of your tracks, which typically generates much less money than an actual download, but given that it usually costs very little to simply send an album to all the stores, it makes sense to do so anyway. Compared to the hassle of pressing CDs it’s still a very cost-effective way to sell music and to showcase your talents worldwide.
This feature first appeared in Music Tech Magazine issue 89
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