Release Time! Ep. 01: Digital Distribution-Distrokid

In this new series we’ll be talking specifics about the many ways to release your music, and special considerations for different playback mediums.

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A digital distributor is a paid service that takes your finished music, and distributes it to online providers of your choice: Apple Music, Spotify, Pandora, Amazon, among many others. Not Bandcamp.

There are many different service providers available, and we’ll talk about a few of the big ones. The first is my recommendation for indie/DIY artists especially: Distrokid.

Pretty simple: you pay them a flat fee per year (as low as $20), for unlimited releases.

Many of their digital distribution competitors charge you for every single release. Tunecore, for example, is about $50 each release after their promo period ends. So, this benefit scales a lot if you have multiple releases planned within the year.

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Another advantage is that Distrokid is adding new features fairly often: they started taking high resolution master files a while back, which is great.

And, there’s also a big new feature in the ability to set up “splits” on royalties. So, if you’re throwing your producer or collaborators a percentage of streaming revenue, that’s easy to set up with other Distrokid users.

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You should always be thinking reasonably far ahead if you want to hit a specific release date on multiple platforms simultaneously. If you want to do this on Distrokid, your desired release date needs to be at least 4 weeks in the future. So, that means that the finished masters should be in your hands by at least a month before you want to release, and it’s always wise to anticipate needing extra time. You can release sooner, if needed, but your music will hit different digital stores at different times, at random.

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And that’s pretty much it! Distrokid is a simple service, fairly priced and done well. Recommended!

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Note: it is a pain in the butt to change digital distributors, and the more music you release the harder it gets.

To do this, you often have to take all of your music down from one service, then resubmit/re-release it on the new service.

Super annoying, so it’s worth it to shop around and make sure you pick a service you like, and one that fits your future needs as well as current needs.