As an independent musician there are many options for getting your music distributed, especially to the streaming services, which is what I'm going to cover here. I won't be talking about physical distribution, CD's, vinyl, etc., as I have no experience in that. This is just about getting your music on to services like Spotify, iTunes and Beatport.
Firstly, what does independent mean in this context. In my case it means a musician who is not represented by a record company or label. I produce, mix and master all my own music. I also do all my own music videos, photography, design and marketing. Finally, I do all my own distribution, which in that case just means getting my music, and associated information and artwork, on to the major streaming services. It's a full time job.
In order to do the distribution I utilize what is known as an independent digital Music Distribution Service, or MDS for short. There are a number of such services available online, and a non-exhaustive list includes Amuse, CD Baby, Distrokid, Ditto, TuneCore and a bunch of others. The way all of these services work is generally the same; you create an account, upload your music, track information and artwork, set a release date, select the stores/services you want to release to, and then let them do their thing.
They will then take all that data and get it up onto the stores or streaming services that you specify. They often also collect data from these stores and provide it back to you, and they may even collect any payments that you are supposed to receive return it to you. Costs and actual services provided by the MDS services will vary from service to service. For example, some charge on a per track release basis, some just charge a yearly rate with unlimited releases. Many offer add on services, like marketing and promotion. I suggest you do some research on the most popular services and decide what's best for you, but read on for what I do and why.
I use 2 separate services, Distrokid and Ditto. I do this because Distrokid is well known in the independent music scene, gets your music onto all the big players and a lot of smaller ones, is well known for their excellent customer service and is incredibly reasonably priced at around $20 per year with unlimited releases, at the low end of their service. They have been really good for me, always deliver, and I rarely hear a bad thing said about them. However, I make electronic music, specifically Tech House and while Distrokid does an excellent job with all the major streaming services and stores, it does not work with some of the electronic specific music distribution services, specifically Beatport.
If you don't know Beatport, it's kind of the be all, and end all, of distribution services for artists in the electronic/house/techno scene.
So, Ditto is also around $20 per year with unlimited releases, gets you onto all the major stores and a LOT of smaller and regional ones and covers the electronic specific distributors like Beatport, Juno and Bleep.
In order to do Beatport releases you will need to create what's called Beatport Label with Ditto. Beatport is kind of selective about the artists and music they carry and generally only deal directly with labels, not with artists. Even then, as a label you need to show that you're actually a real business and not just a pretend label. Ditto gets around that by creating a label for you and repping you to Beatport. This is pretty straight forward, is a one time thing, and comes with an additional one time cost of $50. All releases to Beatport from that point on are free. For example, I created my Screev label through Ditto and you can see it here https://www.beatport.com/label/screev/90928
The way I actually use all of this is that I do my initial release in Distrokid, distributing to all the stores that they support. After they approve the release, which can take anywhere from a few hours to a day, they will then provide back an ISRC number, which is a global identifier to that track or album.
I then go to Ditto and set up a release there, but I only select distribution to Beatport, not any other store. I need to tell Ditto that this track is already released and provide them with the ISRC number, otherwise the release will get rejected. This isn't a problem, and generally it goes to Beatport without issue.
So, why do it this way? Well, while Distrokid has a very good reputation in the independent music scene, Ditto not so much. There is a lot of negative press about Ditto and it's common to find artists who have had issues and found their customer service to be very lacking, causing multiple issue for the artists that become difficult to solve. So, in order to mitigate that risk, but still get my tracks onto Beatport, I do it this way. Yes, there is a slight additional cost with running 2 services, and there is additional work to get a release out but for me the tradeoffs are worth it.
I will say that, having done a number of releases with Ditto now, I'm liking their service a lot. Their network of available MDS's is a much more comprehensive than Distrokid and their web interface is much nicer. Their release process is also a bit cleaner in my mind, but that just might be my personal perspective. I did run into a problem early on with them, and while we did get it resolved, and customer service was pretty attentive, it did take longer than I would have liked to get it all fixed - turnaround times were longish. So for now I'm staying with the current process but I'm considering moving completely to Ditto in the near future if things continue to go well. OK, now you got through all that, enjoy my recent release, and feel free to reach out to me on Instagram @kiddvite should you have any questions, comments or concerns
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