So you’ve got some songs and you’re ready to share them with the world.
What do you do and where do you go first?
Even if you want to sign with a record label, that could take a long time.
How do you grow your career in the meantime, and make some bonus money on the side?
Keep reading to learn how you can sell your own music until you find a label, or self-distribute your tracks if you want to go it alone for the duration.
Streaming Services
One way to earn money in your sleep, so to speak, is to upload your songs to a music streaming and download service and let the royalties roll in.
You’ll have to share and promote your music, of course, but you’ll be in front of a huge audience with the potential for genre-browsers to stumble onto your work.
Streaming services like iTunes, Google Play Music, and Spotify make your songs available for streaming, download, or purchase with subscription or one-time payment.
Each of these companies will take a cut for their trouble, and pay you out of the remainder.
How much will depend on your situation, and which music management service you use.
iTunes
One of the pioneers of (legal) digital music downloading, iTunes has lost some of its market share to upstarts, but still boasts 60 million Apple Music subscribers as of June 2019. Everyone with an iPhone, iPod, or iPad has iTunes pre-installed and Apple Music constantly dangled in front of them.
While they will take direct submissions, iTunes has some pretty hefty requirements before they’ll let you bypass an aggregator.
You need to have at least 20 albums, own a Universal Product Code (UPC) and International Standard Recording Code (ISRC) for each song, AND have a Mac running OS X 10.5.8 or later.
Apparently, they only want to deal directly with superstars.
Since you’re not one of those (yet), your best bet is to work through what is known as an aggregator.
Services like CDBaby, Landr, and Tunecore provide a distribution network that gets you onto the major digital music platforms.
Spotify
Having the largest number of subscribers across all music streaming platforms worldwide, Spotify definitely helped change the face of digital music.
With 217 million monthly users and 100 million active monthly premium members, Spotify possesses 36% of the global music streaming market.
This pioneering company is also responsible for 30% of the recorded music industry’s total generated revenue, and 42% of the streaming market.
Spotify wants you to work with a distributor, label, or aggregator in order to become available on their platform.
Also, be aware that any tracks that you want them to consider for their playlists must be previously unreleased, so they advise setting the release date at least a week in advance of your request.
Google Play Music
As the most common mobile OS worldwide, Android rules the market with 2.5 billion active monthly users as of May 2019.
Every Android phone comes equipped with Google Play Music, meaning there’s a lot of potential customers to reach.
Though iTunes sells over half of all digital music downloads, 73% of music streaming and radio is done on mobile devices as of 2017, and Android accounts for 62% of US mobile OS.
In other words, over half the nation’s smartphones are Android, and ¾ of music streaming listening is done on smartphones.
So it makes sense to include Google Play Music on your list of target platforms.
As with the other major music platforms, Google Play wants you to come through a music aggregator.
Amazon Music
Giving the other platforms a run for their money, Amazon music came in third among streaming services as of the first half of 2019.
With their service offered at a discount to Prime members, Amazon Music reaches a lot of listeners.
With more than 100 million Amazon Prime subscribers, Amazon is on track to retain a good portion of the digital music market.
And with devices like Echo and Echo Dot, users have even more ways to access Prime Music by asking Alexa to play something.
Aggregators
A music aggregator is like an agent between you and the digital music networks.
They charge either a flat rate fee or a percentage of your profits.
In return for this payment, they register your music with appropriate US and international organizations, get your International Standard Music Number (ISMN), and register you with performing rights organizations to help protect your music from theft and plagiarism.
The major music platforms will not accept your music if it doesn’t have an ISMN, which is the musical equivalent of a book’s ISBN, which is registered and encoded as a unique identifier of that particular work.
The numbers are embedded in the bar code that goes along with any physical manifestation of the product, such as a CD.
It’s also important to protect your international royalties. Certain distributors/aggregators will get you affiliated with a Performing Rights Organization (PRO) in the US (ASCAP, BMI) and/or Canada (SOCAN).
PROs do not cover or collect download or streaming royalties, however, so this is another reason to choose your distributor carefully based on the exact services they offer.
The music distributors listed below all do the same basic thing–they take your music, register it, assign it an ISMN, and then send it to digital download and streaming services.
They also collect your royalties for you and send you a payment either monthly or twice per month.
Yet the full range of services beyond that (such as offering digital mastering of tracks, print-on-demand hard copies, etc) or even whether they charge a flat-rate fee, percentage of your royalties, or both, varies by the individual service.
Which aggregator service is best for you will depend on your business model and (realistic) number of expected sales.
If you just want to get on a platform, you may opt for the royalty option in case you don’t make a lot of sales, and that way, you aren’t out any money unless you’re making some, too.
This is also a good choice if you just don’t have the cash for an up-front investment right now.
On the other hand, if you have a decent social media following and are playing live in more than just your hometown, you could generate a fair amount of buzz by telling people to find you on their favorite music streaming and download platform at every event.
If this is the case, you may want to opt for the initial investment and bank on your revenue eventually surpassing it.
CDBaby
Offering worldwide, flat-rate distribution, CDBaby bills itself as the “Preferred distribution partner of Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube.” with weekly payouts and a fee-per-album format.
CDBaby is pretty straightforward in operation.
It also offers the option to purchase UPC barcodes per track or per album, which is permanently assigned to your music forever.
CDBaby will also report your sales, based on this barcode, to Billboard music charts on a weekly basis.
If your goal is to make a Top X on the charts, this is a great perk to have.
Another selling point for CDBaby is their physical CD manufacturing.
Many music fans still want hard copy albums, and CDBaby provides that.
Both their Standard and Pro plans include this option.
Whether you want a place to direct fans who want a hard copy, or want to offer them for sale at your events, CDBaby is a great way to get those copies produced.
At $9.95 per single and $29.95 for an album, the Standard plan gets you the core services you need, such as global digital and physical CD distribution, having your music for sale on store.cdbaby.com, YouTube monetization, and sync licensing for TV, film, and games.
The Pro plan includes all of this, and adds registration and membership with worldwide PROs, registering your song with global collection agencies, and worldwide royalty collection.
CDBaby also offers analytics so that you can track the performance of your songs by platform, and has a variety of tools to help you promote your music.
They also give you a way to order customized merchandise like shirts, hats, and bags with your band name and logo.
Sell them on your site or at events, or use them in giveaway promotions to give your exposure a boost!
TuneCore
With a yearly subscription fee and a one-time publishing fee, TuneCore seems pretty pricey at first glance.
But if you’re writing the kind of music that might be used in film, commercials, and TV shows around the world, you may want TuneCore’s dedication to tracking down royalties in your corner.
Promising to collect the other 50% of global royalties they claim other companies don’t, TuneCore will register your songs worldwide, monetize you on YouTube, and collect all of your sync and mechanical rights royalties for you.
Mastering, reviews, social promotion, and even payment advances are all perks that help balance out the pricey one-time publishing setup fee ($75) and per-service add-ons like making sure you get a cut from every occurrence of your song on YouTube, and TuneCore Social, which offers you valuable feedback data from your social media advertising efforts.
They also provide a special app on which you can track all your engagement stats across social media, without logging into TuneCore, and offer a special upgraded program with social media reports you can use to prove your audience strength to a label unsure about your sales potential.
Landr
Offering a variety of subscription plans that can be billed monthly, or yearly at a discounted rate, Landr offers both mastering and release, and release-only plans.
They also allow you to release 2 tracks per month with a free account, so that you can get familiar with the site and the process before you make a final decision.
Release-only subscriptions start at a modest $1 per month, which gets you 10 tracks, $2/month gets you 30, and $4/month allows for unlimited releases.
For mastering and release combo plans, Basic starts at $4/month, and each plan adds more features and upgrades, either on a per-fee basis or rolled into the subscription.
The Advanced plan costs $9per month and adds more features as well as more mastering options, and the Pro plan jumps to $25/month and allows for unlimited everything.
Letting you keep all your music rights and royalties, Landr is great for musicians with a good amount of sales.
Shell out one flat rate, and you never pay any more no matter how high your sales rise.
On the other hand, if you’re off to a slow start, you may pay more upfront than you’ll make back for a while.
A good plan may be to start with the cheaper subscription option, and upgrade as your sales and output begin to increase.
The last thing you want is to pay $300 all at once for the first year of the Pro plan and then stall out due to unexpected delays.
What about GigFaster?
We don’t get you on iTunes, Spotify, or Amazon Music, but we do get you pitcher-perfect for submitting to a label.
The better your digital sales record, the more impressive your pitch is likely to be.
Labels are like companies in any other industry–sometimes they take risks, but the more information they have, the better decision they can make.
The best information you can give them is a detailed accounting of your streams and downloads across all major platforms.
They want to see that you have an audience, and the potential for a bigger one.
When you sign up with GigFaster, we help you manage your demo tracks, write your pitch, and send it to record labels that deal with your kind of music.
You bring the music and the audience, and we’ll bring your shot to pitch your dreams.
We help you book live events in the places that make sense for you, because it’s all about building your reach until you can finally reach the stars.
Sign up with us today, and let our free trial show you how it all works.
