As I’m consolidating my music stuff, I’ve been looking at signing up with an aggregator but as I dive into the mire of streaming etc… suddenly realised that they don’t seem to all offer lyrics as well as music. I was reading up on CD baby as a one payment option but can’t find any way that they provide lyrics to the songs.
Distrokid are the only ones I’ve found who claim to offer a full lyric option. Am wondering if I’ve missed something here… ?
So a question for you already-out-there veterans… does your aggregator enable the publishing of lyric sheets with each song?
I know you already said Distrokid offers it, but yeah I just logged in to check, and they do have that option. I should add my lyrics. I didn’t really know it was there.
thanks, yep, I was quite surprised to find others didn’t offer it… well, for me, the lyrics are really important as they are usually my starting point for a song. Apparently spotify used to have lyrics available and then stopped several years ago but now have started up again with apps available. So would you recommend Distrokid?
Any issues? I kinda like the no-frills web site.
FWIW, Warren Huart recommended DistroKid over CDBaby and Tunecore. He’s well respected in the industry, and helps up-and-comers specifically. I can’t personally vouch for it as I haven’t used it, but if I were going to do something on it I have already decided to follow his recommendation.
Hi Emma If I was at all successful with my music, I might be the one to guide you about
Distro. I was there for a year and for the $20 invested I earned $3.16 haha I did got hundreds of plays, but each one yielded on an average like 0.012 (I have a breakdown if you ever wanted to see it) At the end I told them to keep it good luck
Do you have a link to an article where he explains why he recommends DK? I really like CD Baby but I’m always interested in seeing things from other points of view.
@feaker
You made MONEY… from music???
hehehe… well… that is an unexpected bonus eh?
(grin)
Did you get the plays on spotify? C’mon, tell me the story… please…
Hi Emma I will see if I can find the specs on this. Yes, spotify, google play…I can’t remember all of them cuz I’m not with it. I’ll see if they let me back in to peek. I think I put that on the forum before, but of course can remember the topic they were under
Ok this is what I posted here awhile back. It is not the final tally. Must have been somewhere around mid year. Whatever. ha ha
iTunes $0.83
Apple Music $0.38
Apple Beats 1 Radio $0.00
Spotify $0.71
Pandora $0.00
Deezer $0.00
Tidal $0.03
YouTube (Ads) $0.00
YouTube (Red) $0.00
YouTube (ContentID) $0.00
Groove (Streaming) $0.00
Groove (Downloads) $0.00
Google Play $0.00
Google Play All Access $0.05
Amazon (Downloads) $0.00
Amazon Prime (Streaming) $0.00
Amazon Unlimited (Streaming) $0.06
Distrokid has been pretty good. It’s inexpensive and it gets your music into the stores. The reporting on earnings is satisfactory. I hope they’ll create some neat visualizations though for the analytics. Right now you can either see a breakdown by store, or the “excruciating detail” page which really is too much detail, haha. The upload process is pretty easy. They make it easy to share your earnings too. I’ve done some collaborations and they just set me up with some percentage and the money goes directly to me.
Customer support is lousy though. I’ve always managed to work out my issues, but it takes some patience. I have had a few releases where something went wrong. My EP was released very late due to some glitch in the system. Then I had a cover song that sat there for like 2 weeks before I asked what was going on with it, and they were like, “oh, the cover song license was rejected, sorry.” And I ended up emailing back and forth and finding that actually it wasn’t rejected, and had to re-upload the song to have it go through. And most recently my artwork kept getting rejected, which I finally traced back to clicking the “convert to sRGB color space” option in photoshop, which wasn’t documented anywhere in their requirements. But yeah, customer support is like the bare minimum effort on their part and it’s frustrating.
But I still use it and recommend it because I think it’s the best one out there.
I didn’t do as good as @feaker did on DistroKid, I made .34 cents. It was kind of neat to see your stuff on Amazon and iTunes, but I got over that. I’m sure @Cristina does better as she makes an effort to have a real presence online. You have a good following on SoundCloud, so maybe that’ll translate to more streams for you. I thought I saw that SC was monetizing now? (Too lazy to look it up, sorry.)
If you want CDs without CDBaby, we made a product on Kunaki to create and sell them. It’s totally automated and pretty robotic, but FREE and it works great. Your product expires after 180 days of inactivity, and I finally let mine lapse. But I have a handful of CDs just because it’s kind of cool to have your music on a CD.
But when all is said and done, I find I prefer BandCamp. It is FREE and let’s you totally set up your webpage as you’d like, lyrics and all. You can also sell merchandise through their store. My one gripe is that is is not the most convenient for streaming. I wish it had a better interface for just playing music in a genre you like. My default for that is Pandora. What I REALLY like though is that it is free and you can totally set it up how you like. Very artist oriented.
I like SoundCloud for quick uploads and sharing stuff I’m working on, and BandCamp for my “permanent” releases. FWIW
Yeah I have about $900 from Distrokid since I set it up. I agree that your Soundcloud fans might want to buy your music, or stream it elsewhere. The trick would be communicating to them that you are now distributing your music to online stores and encouraging them to buy/stream.
You have your music on Pandora? I don’t think any of my stuff got accepted. Did you submit it manually? I’ve just been letting Distrokid submit it for me, and like I said I don’t believe it’s on there.
It’s a funny thought to actually make money from it… my key aspiration is an audience… Yeah I thought I’d message all my soundcloud followers once I have the album organised… am currently trying to rationalise the workload and shut up my internal critic… I just have this part of me that wants to be perfect ha double ha… but am choosing songs that only need minor tweaks for me to be okay with them, otherwise I will never be done.
With the discount offered on Distrokid I went for the medium plan that has a few more features. It also allows you to pre-load before release which is a moot point for me but could possibly be useful. I’m now faffing about trying to find a free way to set up an okay web page. A zero budget makes things quite straight forward in an obscure way… no need to even worry about a mastering engineer haha…
Sorry, I should have made a new paragraph. That was poorly organized stream of consciousness. The “pandora” sentence belongs with the two prior: “I wish it had a better interface for just playing music in a genre you like. My default for that is Pandora.” The “it” was BandCamp.
We never made it onto Pandora either.
@Emma, what BandCamp has going for it, other than being free, is you can set it up how you like - within their template. I found it very frustrating to try to update anything on Spotify when it was distributed through DistroKid. And I don’t think you can modify any of the other streaming outlets. (?)
IMHO, you have a great audience on SoundCloud already, you can add a link there to point to your BandCamp page where your fans can go and show you their appreciation. It’s (BandCamp) also a nice place to keep your “official” releases.
Thanks @miked
I did set up a bandcamp page a few years back but never really got into it, will re-visit.
I also did get a domain name waay back so am exploring that plus the joys of wordpress…
Rather a lot of stuff really but I seem to have a degree of motivation so will follow along.
I’d love to get back the vibe I had when soundcloud was really working, it was a fun thing that really hummed for a while there.
Again, IMHO, I think BC is the perfect extension of that - once you get it set up and figure it out. Time much better spent there than learning WordPress and keeping up with a domain. But that’s just me. I’m lazy.
good luck
