You Don't Need a Record Label to Get on Beatport, iTunes or Spotify

My new single "Don't Wait" comes out tomorrow so, I'm going to tell you how I've decided to release most of my music, and why I waited so long to do so.  But first, let's address the elephant in the room.  Sure Fictional Reader, I may not need a record label, but judging by my thumbnail I sure as hell need a graphic designer for these post. 

Oh, wait you weren't going to take a jab at me and I'm just being self-conscious?  Sorry, I miss judged you and was just projecting.  We cool?  Can we move on?  Ok, cool.

So, a little backstory, back in the mid 2000's I had finished my second Spokenword album and was looking at releasing it. At this point digital downloads had started taking over the market. I didn't know how the hell I was supposed to get my album into iTunes because surely you needed a company to do so.  I was wrong.  I came across this service call Tunecore, and at the time it seemed to be the only name in the game that allowed independent artist to release their music on digital distribution sites.  So I jump in full force, wide-eyed and bushy-tailed, but damn at the time their price was $50 per year per album. Just to have it listed!

Now as an independent artist, from a $0.99 download the artist will make about $0.70 cents off that download.  This means that in order just to break even, the artist has to sell 72 downloads. Tunecore does now only charge $30 for the first year, and then $50 each year afterwards, but still this is per album.  Yes, that's for the album, so to break even it's a bit less if you only sold albums. Let's be real, most people only buy singles if they even buy downloads at all.  Services like Spotify and Apple Music, get most of the listening share in today's market.  For Spotify streaming an artist get's about $0.007 cents per stream. This means the artist would need to have 7143 streams just to break even if they released their music through Tunecore.

So because of this for a long time, I just release my music through other avenues, like selling physical CDs at shows and selling through Bandcamp when that came around. 

So, how are you doing it now?

Damnit Fictional Reader, haven't you started learning by now from reading my previous posts that I'm a long winded story teller.  Get with the program YO!

So a few years back I heard about this new service called DistroKid, and from what I heard from other independent artists, they were not only fair, but really cool to work with.  They distribute to all of the main digital distribution platforms, and best of all their prices were only $20/year for unlimited songs.  That's right, I still don't understand how the hell they do it, other than the fact that maybe, they just are not greedy ass people looking to take advantage of independent artist under the disguise of "helping". 

But even though I knew about them, I still didn't sign up with them until this year.  This mainly was because they did not, at the time, distribute to Beatport.  This was a deal breaker for me as an electronic music producer having my music in Beatport, I felt like, was a must. If you are interested in knowing why I felt this way, let me know in the comments and I'll be sure to write a post about it.

Anyway, since the days of Tunecore, so many other similar services have popped up, most of them don't distribute to Beatport, I think it must have something to do with Beatports curation standards.  So I started searching, and I came first across Ditto but they at the time wanted $129 or something like that for the package that included unlimited distribution to Beatport. Since then, just checking their site it looks like they have since dropped it to $20 a year, but I'm pretty sure this has to do with DistroKid finally introducing Beatport as an option on their services as well.  There is one other service I was considering before DistroKid added Beatport, and that was MondoTunes, because at the time they were the lowest I could find at $40/year.

At the end of the day I finally decided to start releasing my music through DistroKid, not just for the pricing, but also because they clearly have proven to be looking out for the little guy.  All the other services I've mentioned overcharged for access to Beatport distribution and it wasn't until DistroKid introduced the service into their services as standard, that Ditto realized they had to step up their game. 

I am not a paid promoter of DistroKid, in-fact, I pay for their service and have even upgraded to a higher package.  I just really like how indie DistroKid really is.  I mean seriously just tweet them, or message them, they will get a back at you quick, and do what they can to help you out.  The big thing that won me over, is just how quick they added Beatport to my options when it was invite only, and I had just signed up with them.  That and when at first the capitalization in my "dj FUGLY" branding came out wrong, they helped me resolve that quick (there is a trick to it, just ask them).

Point being my second single is being released tomorrow on all the platforms, and I couldn't be happier with taking my time to pick the right distributor for me.  DistroKid may not be the best option, do your research, I've linked to all the other services as well.

-dj FUGLY
-Spotify