By distributing your music to stores & streaming services such as Spotify or Apple Music, you are able to gain revenue from your music. In this article I’m going to tell you how to distribute music and what you need to know before doing it.
What is a music distributor
A music distributors is a third party service which is used to distribute your music to streaming services and stores such as:
- Spotify
- Apple Music
- Amazon
- YouTube Music
- Deezer
- Google Play Music
- iTunes
- TikTok
- YouTube Content Id
- and many more…
Without a music distributor you are not able to get your music to the stores and streaming services, thus are not able to gain revenue from it.
You can’t directly upload your music to Spotify, fro example. This is because they would be flooded with new music submission and the quality of the releases on these services would drastically go down because they would not have enough resources to monitor the submissions.
That’s why we have third party music distributors who handles the quality control and possible copyright side of the game. However, Spotify is actually testing a feature which would allow artists to directly submit their music to Spotify but it’s uncertain if it ever happens.
You also need a music distributor in order to collect YouTube add revenue. When someone uploads a video on YouTube featuring your music, you are able to gain revenue from that video.
Music distributors may also collect revenue to you from ad or commercial placements, for example.
What do you need before distributing music
Before distributing your song you need to make sure that the track is in correct format. Here are the specs most distributors requires for you audio file to be:
- 16 bit (sample size)
- 44.1 kHz (sample rate)
- 1411 kbps (bit rate) stereo Wav
This can be done by exporting your song from your DAW (digital audio workstation). The most used DAW’s are FL Studio, Ableton, Protools and Cubase.
You will also need a cover picture for your song. Once the song is live on Spotify, for example, this picture will be displayed. The preferred size of a cover picture is 3000 x 3000 pixels. The cover picture should include the song name and your artist name.
I myself use Photoshop when I’m making cover pictures for my songs. Most of my background pictures I’ve got from Pexels and Pixabay. These both sites offers public domain pictures that can be used for free without any charge.
How to distribute music
There are at least a dozen of different music distribution services. Some of them are better than others and they all have their own monetization model. For example, some music distributors charges 10$ per song per year when you distribute your music while other distributor may charge 15% of your total revenue the song has gained. So basically this means that if you are new to the game you probably won’t get that many streams right away which means that you are better off with a plan that charges a certain % of your total revenue.
However, you should always consider other factors too when selecting a music distributor. Some distributors have much better customer services and music promotion tools than others. Also, some distributors distributes your song to much more stores and streaming services than others.
Here are some well known music distribution services that can get your songs to Spotify and other major streaming services & stores. Personally I have used TuneCore, RepostNetwork and Distrokid.
How to sell & stream music without a music distributor
If you don’t want to use a music distributor you can’t get your music to major stores & streaming services. However, there are other ways to sell music and let people stream it.
Probably the most well know free music selling platform is Bandcamp. Bandcamp let’s you to sell and upload your music directly on their platform so you don’t need a third party music distributor.
If you want to get your songs streamed without a music distributor the most obvious place to upload them to is YouTube. However, you will need make a video for it if you want to upload your music to YouTube.
You can also upload your music to SoundCloud which can be done for free. SoundCloud used to be a big player but it has lost some of it’s touch. However, it is still used by millions of users and you should certainly test.
Lastly, don’t forget that you can use your own website to sell your songs. Making an own website is so easy and straight forward in these days that there are no excuses not making one. For example, you can make an own website or music blog using WordPress or Wix. I have used WordPress to make this websites and my hosting service is Bluehost.
Conclusions
When distributing your music the most important thing is that you need to carefully select the best music distributor for you. It’s painful and slow process to change music distributor if you have already distributed your song to Spotify and you want to change distributor.
You should also know that it can take up to 3 weeks before your release goes live on certain stores. So you should always distribute your song at least 2-4 weeks ahead of time to ensure that the release goes live on the exact date you wanted. It also gives you more time to promote your release to Spotify playlist curators if you have distributed your song early.