How do you choose your music distributor - e.g. CD Baby, DistroKid, TuneCore?

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How do you choose your music distributor - e.g. CD Baby, DistroKid, TuneCore?

Post by Jeax »

From most of what I've read, for a US-based musician, CD Baby and DistroKid seem to be the best I've found few people able to discuss in the detail the pros and cons between them. That's without including Tunecore. Distrokid seems to keep most of their FAQ's basic and one simply tells you to create an account to learn more about pricing.
https://aristake.com/post/cd-baby-tunec ... imbalam-or

Any advice?
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Re: How do you choose your music distributor - e.g. CD Baby, DistroKid, TuneCore?

Post by sysrqer »

I would be interested to know about this too. I've seen a few android apps that can apparently upload your tracks to spotify and a few other places.
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Re: How do you choose your music distributor - e.g. CD Baby, DistroKid, TuneCore?

Post by tavasti »

I personally use routenote, it is free, and I get 85% of income. In my case this far, that missing 15% would not be many cents :-)
That was the first distributor I found to have free plan for getting music to spotify and all other services.

There is some comparisons available:
https://aristake.com/post/cd-baby-tunec ... imbalam-or
https://www.productionmusiclive.com/blo ... -vs-others

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Re: How do you choose your music distributor - e.g. CD Baby, DistroKid, TuneCore?

Post by Jeax »

I've seen the Aris Take, but not the ProductionMusicLive. How do you compare RouteNote to the others?
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Re: How do you choose your music distributor - e.g. CD Baby, DistroKid, TuneCore?

Post by tavasti »

Jeax wrote:I've seen the Aris Take, but not the ProductionMusicLive. How do you compare RouteNote to the others?
No idea, don't know anything about others. From Aris Take, it looks like there might be some more optimal, but not sure if I will do any switch. I have this far one track released for 'testing' and no listeners, so revenues are zero anyway :-)

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Re: How do you choose your music distributor - e.g. CD Baby, DistroKid, TuneCore?

Post by Jeax »

CD Baby seems like the safe bet but DistroKid seems like the #2. This and how to handle the ISRC seem like the 2 biggest conversations few musicans are having often.
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Re: How do you choose your music distributor - e.g. CD Baby, DistroKid, TuneCore?

Post by tavasti »

Jeax wrote:CD Baby seems like the safe bet but DistroKid seems like the #2. This and how to handle the ISRC seem like the 2 biggest conversations few musicans are having often.
For my needs (publishing music which most likely nobody will listen) they are not optimal. They have chages for releases. For my kind of hobbyist, services which do not have any fees are best.

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Re: How do you choose your music distributor - e.g. CD Baby, DistroKid, TuneCore?

Post by Jeax »

Distrokid is ~$30/yr and ~$50 for it to stay on for life.

Anyone got good info on deciding between getting ISRC only from a distributor or buying your own ?
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Re: How do you choose your music distributor - e.g. CD Baby, DistroKid, TuneCore?

Post by tavasti »

42low wrote:
tavasti wrote:Thif/ first distributor I found to have free plan for getting music to spotify and all other services.
And? Did their plan work?
Are you selling at spotify?

Btw, i always wonder if/which amateurs become on spotify. Can you really get or buy your music in?
Yes, music gets to spotify.

In Spotify, you aren't selling, but you earn something minimal for every listen you get. Because my music (one track with 2 versions, and not very good track) doesn't get too much listening, my earnings are minimal, and they won't be paid until 50$ collected (with current amount on listens, takes few years). One friend of mine has better music, and some fans, and he gets his money ok.

And with Routenote, you music will get to plenty of other places also, like iTunes, Deezer, etc. And you get also some income from youtube music use also, but only if you music is on videos some company wants to have commercials, or somebody with paid youtube account is watching them. I think I have got 0.02$ from youtube, somebody watched some my video with paid youtube (Youtube red).

In case you are releasing something thru routenote, you could use my referal code 2f750c92 on registration, and I would get some small percentage of your sales, but not from your profit, but from that 15% share routenote is taking.

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Re: How do you choose your music distributor - e.g. CD Baby, DistroKid, TuneCore?

Post by GMaq »

Hi,

Happy with CD Baby here, music has all ended up where it is supposed to and money has been paid when enough collects. If you watch their newsletters there are good deals on album distribution every once in a while which can save you money. For my first album I got their sister company 'DiscMakers' to press CD's but I'm in Canada and the US currency exchange is now not good so I get discs done in Canada now, you can send your discs wherever they are manufactured to the CD Baby warehouse to be sold through their site, but as everyone knows CD's are dying fast and very few people want them even if you give them away at gigs so that's not really a selling point in this day and age.

Secondly CD Baby has good marketing resources for those who are interested, they have a lot of good email articles on promoting your music in the current digital wilderness and host a big Indie music conference every year. On top of that they have very affordable merch if you want to get T shirts etc made and also a pretty affordable website service called "HostBaby' if you want a website for your band but aren't web savvy.

CD Baby is more expensive than others if you pay full price for distribution, in fairness they have a lot of services that add value..
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Re: How do you choose your music distributor - e.g. CD Baby, DistroKid, TuneCore?

Post by Jeax »

GMaq wrote:Hi,
CD Baby is more expensive than others if you pay full price for distribution, in fairness they have a lot of services that add value..
What are you paying more for with CD Baby that's cheaper with DistroKid or Sounddrop? Also, how do you deal with split payments?
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Re: How do you choose your music distributor - e.g. CD Baby, DistroKid, TuneCore?

Post by sysrqer »

tavasti wrote:I personally use routenote, it is free, and I get 85% of income. In my case this far, that missing 15% would not be many cents :-)
That was the first distributor I found to have free plan for getting music to spotify and all other services.

There is some comparisons available:
https://aristake.com/post/cd-baby-tunec ... imbalam-or
https://www.productionmusiclive.com/blo ... -vs-others
I've tried to use routenote (I used your referral code) but I can't upload an album, when I try only some tracks are accepted and gives me this:

Upload Failed. Please check to make sure your mp3 is encoded to
320kbps and 44100Khz.

This was with flac at 16bit 44.1khz, and also mp3 same rates at 320kbps. I found a forum post about tags being a problem but I followed the advice but still the same.

Is there something I'm doing wrong?
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Re: How do you choose your music distributor - e.g. CD Baby, DistroKid, TuneCore?

Post by tavasti »

sysrqer wrote:
tavasti wrote:I personally use routenote, it is free, and I get 85% of income. In my case this far, that missing 15% would not be many cents :-)
I've tried to use routenote (I used your referral code) but I can't upload an album, when I try only some tracks are accepted and gives me this:

Upload Failed. Please check to make sure your mp3 is encoded to
320kbps and 44100Khz.

This was with flac at 16bit 44.1khz, and also mp3 same rates at 320kbps. I found a forum post about tags being a problem but I followed the advice but still the same.

Is there something I'm doing wrong?
Most likely yes, I remember hitting that same error message once with file I got directly from landr.com (tried that for mastering). How did you create your mp3 file?

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Re: How do you choose your music distributor - e.g. CD Baby, DistroKid, TuneCore?

Post by sysrqer »

All of my files would have been exported directly from various DAWs and then converted to MP3 with deadbeef or FFmpeg.

I managed to upload one album but two others kept failing. I was using firefox and decided to give chromium a try and sure enough they uploaded straight away with no problems so it seems that routenote doesn't like firefox for some reason.
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Re: How do you choose your music distributor - e.g. CD Baby, DistroKid, TuneCore?

Post by tavasti »

sysrqer wrote:All of my files would have been exported directly from various DAWs and then converted to MP3 with deadbeef or FFmpeg.

I managed to upload one album but two others kept failing. I was using firefox and decided to give chromium a try and sure enough they uploaded straight away with no problems so it seems that routenote doesn't like firefox for some reason.
Strange, I've uploaded mine with firefox (2 tracks)

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