Distribution is the releasing of music into the world after it has been created. You have to use a distributor to get your music onto streaming platforms and often musicians set this up by themselves unless you are with a record label. They also own no rights to your music. As I am an independent artist, I will be going directly through a distributor myself to get my singles out there. Mostly working with digital distribution, groups like Distrokid, CD Baby, TuneCore and many others, you pay a fee to have your music released and get revenue back (often 100%) for every stream on whatever platforms you upload it to and when your song might be used in a TikTok, youtube video, or Instagram post, for example. This is great in hindsight, but many small artists struggle to make a profit with the revenue after they have paid the fee to get their music out. As these will be my debut singles and I don’t have much of a fanbase, I am most likely to not make a profit from my music yet (unless the songs end up blowing up and being really popular!). However, just the idea of having my own music accounts and my singles being out to the world for anyone to hear is an amazing prospect; I am not really interested in the profit side of things.
After a long time looking into what distribution actually, I then had to decide which distributor I wanted to go with. I used this extremely detailed article to help me come to an educated decision to make sure I am not thrown into the deep end or choosing the wrong company for what I want to get out of releasing: https://aristake.com/digital-distribution-comparison/. This site looks at each and every distributor and weighs them up in an unbiased way to see what suits you the most. for example, “DistroKid is very data focused with no bells and whistles… Just one page to distribute your song or album... I love that DistroKid gives you the ability to set your timestamp for TikTok… It’s also great that they give you the ability to download your songs. So if your hard drive crashes, your wavs are stored in their cloud.” However, it mentions the cons as well; “WORST: Some upfront fees. Some hidden fees. Revenue reports are poor / decent.” (Herstand, 2020).
After looking through the chart on the site and reading about what select distributors have to offer, Distrokid was the clear winner for me and my preferences. The pricing is great and affordable. Given that I don’t know how much content I will be releasing in a year, it made more sense to pay an annual fee than to pay for each thing I release. This ruled out companies like TuneCore and CD Baby. Distrokid also features Spotify pre-save, publish to TikTok and Instagram, commission splitting, and also has fairly quick publishes to streaming services. As well as acting as a distribution company, it also has lots of promotional tools, such as applying to Spotify playlists, seeing reports on your music, producing promotional videos for your social media and generating release cards.
When it came to releasing my music once my first track had been mastered, I signed up with the musician plan on Distrokid. However, with this plan, I came across a problem. On the upload page, you can’t actually set a release date unless you go for the upgraded plan, which I wasn’t prepared to buy yet. Instead of setting a release date, it just processes and uploads the song whenever it is finished, causing the problem that your song might not actually be out in time for your release date. I had read about many people who were waiting weeks or even months for their song to be released, even though Distrokid said it should be up in a week. This made me feel very pressured and quite stressed as I had no idea if the song would be out in time and I couldn’t change my release date as then that would be out of the course deadline and cannot be applied to my work.
I got the first single out as quickly as I could in the hopes that it would be out before the release date, and luckily it did just that. I am not going to tell anyone that it is released yet until the 28th so people would think it was just put out and had not been up a weeks prior! Having an early release is good as it gave me the chance to customize my artist profiles on the streaming platforms before people saw them, so I change headers, profile pictures, bios and more so my profile is more personalised. This made me look more professional and sophisticated. It then came time to post my other song onto Distrokid. Knowing the limitation that the musician plan had, I tried my best to give myself as much time as possible to get my track onto Distrokid so the song would be on Spotify and other streaming platforms in time for the 28th (release day). So, I filled in the upload form as Lewis was mastering my track and as soon as I received it, I just had to upload the file and submit the track. I credited Lex in the song as he played the flute; this instrument is very prominent in the song so I felt like he deserved some recognition.