How to publish your music to Spotify, Apple Music, and everywhere
Getting your music published next to the biggest superstars is much easier now than it was just ten years ago. Yet, getting it to the platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer, etc. is still not as easy as just uploading a track to SoundCloud or Bandcamp.
Those platforms don’t want or can’t deal with millions of indie musicians. So you have to go through an intermediary also known as a distributor. Distributor will take care of sending your tracks or albums to as many platforms as they can (or as you want), collect royalties from all of them, and then pay them out to you.
Distributors for “the rest of us”
While nowadays there are tens (hundreds?) of distributors doing essentially the same thing at the core, for indie artists it all started with DistroKid (referral link: you get 7% off and I get a small kickback). I’ve been following Philip (aka pud) from the early 2000s and I always liked his approach to starting small(-ish) hands-on global businesses. So, it wasn’t surprising that he was the one who started the revolution in music distribution.
I’ve recommended DistroKid to a few musicians I know long before I used it myself (as I had nothing to release until last year ;) but when the time came, I had no doubts as to what service to use to distribute my music.
For less than $20/year you get to distribute and collect royalties from as many songs or albums as you wish. They guide you through the quirks of the platforms (how to format titles, what is OK and not OK on album covers, etc.) and they also have a bunch of extra free services like “meme” video generators, landing pages (called HyperFollow), Spotify pre-saving, etc., and paid extras like music visualizers, cover licenses (that’s how I’m making sure Marting L. Gore doesn’t starve ;), and more.
There are also related community projects like Distrolytics by yours truly.
All-in-all it is a great service for a great price, so you may be wondering…
…why do other services exist?
DistroKid is great when you want to release music continuously and don’t plan to stop in the foreseeable future. But if you have just one song or album that you want to release as a one-off and don’t want to ever think about it again, then DistroKid can quickly turn from cheap to quite expensive — as you will have to pay every year to keep your song on the platforms.
In this case you may want to go with a per-release pricing of distributors like CD Baby.
Or if you don’t expect to be making any meaningful money from your music you may want to go with someone who doesn’t charge for distribution but rather keeps a percentage of your royalties, like AWAL.
Or you may want to research who has better customer support if you like to be guided through the process. A few times I had to contact DistroKid’s support I got solid help in a timely manner but it’s a small team and your results may vary (at least this was one of the common complaints from DistroKid customers not too long ago).
Another thing to consider is distributor’s “location”. For those outside theUS working with a US distributor like DistroKid could mean that while they don’t charge any percentage of your revenue themselves, they may have to withhold some money according to the taxation treaties (or lack thereof) between your country and the US.
All-in-all there are a lot of moving parts for those aiming to maximize their ROI but from my personal perspective DistroKid is still the tried-and-true default option.
