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In order to release music on Spotify and Apple Music, you must sign up to a digital distributor. These distributors are basically how record labels have caught up with the new medium of digital streaming. There are many digital distributors available, some charge an upfront fee and some charge commission on streams of your music. I did some research, which was a bit tedious, and in the end, I found one distributor that seemed right for me.
CD Baby don’t charge an upfront fee but do charge for each release and take 15% on streams. I found this desirable because other distributors that have a subscription fee will take your music down if you cancel and being a completely new artist my aim to gain exposure, not rake in revenue. For $5 I can release my single on Spotify and Apple Music. The main draw that attracted me to CD Baby was the ability to have the single included in the Instagram and Facebook music catalogue, allowing people to use the song on their stories on those platforms. CD Baby also distributes music within 1-2 working days, so I can tweak my single last minute if necessary.
Apart from Spotify and Apple Music, I also looked at SoundCloud and Bandcamp. SoundCloud appears to be more of a sharing platform for artists, so I have decided that I will release music on there in order to try and build a community of artists to collaborate with, however this is a tangent to the main purpose of my project so I’m not going to sink much effort into it. Bandcamp is a great way to release music, allowing artists to share music without a distributor. However, it by far the least popular music platform with an average of 28 million monthly visitors, compared to SoundCloud’s 120 million. In short, I will be using these platforms because I don’t want to waste opportunity, but I will be treating them as an afterthought after Spotify and Apple Music.
For now, I need to focus on finishing my music but this research has proved useful because prior to conducting it I knew nothing about digital music distribution.
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