OK, so now that we have looked at some of the, more or less, one-stop services out there,
for music promotion and sales, let’s look at a couple of music aggregators that concentrate
mostly on distributing your music to different online music services and retailers, and get
a sense of the lay of the land in that area. We’ll start with TuneCore. TuneCore has
been around since 2006, and during that time has made their members over 400 million dollars,
selling over 6 billion downloads and streams. It does one thing, and it does it well. Actually
it used to do one thing. Now it has a number of services, but it still does that one, original
thing well. And that’s distributing your digital music to online music services and
stores. Upload your single or an album, and it will distribute it to about 30 main stream
digital music retailers and streaming services, including iTunes, Spotify, AmazonMP3, Google
Play, Shazam, Rhapsody, BeatsMusic, and so on. Yes, it’s that simple to have your music
included on all those sites and services. Join, pay the fee, upload, and you are on,
your music available all over the net, around the world. And before you get too excited
about it, just remember how we said earlier that that’s good news and bad news, at the
same time. If it is that easy for you to get your music on all those sites, it is just
as easy for everyone else, so the competition is brutal out there. That’s why we spent
all that time earlier talking about building your market presence by performing, creating
your narrative, and communicating with the public through services that might help you
connect with your fans, network, promote your music, and expand your fan base. Just putting
the music up on iTunes or Spotify, or any of the music sites, is simply not enough to
move forward.
And while on the topic of what all is needed to move forward, how about regular radio?
How do we get our music on those radio playlists, and do we need that at all, as an indie? Of
course, it would be nice and helpful to have radio airplay. Radio is still a major instrument
driving sales and fan base expansion. But, the mainstream radio is not a cheap tool,
and it may be prohibitively expensive for an artist to utilize it in the early part
of his career. Radio promotion service companies could charge thousands, and tens of thousands,
of dollars for a month or a two-month long campaign, promoting a single with radio stations
across the country. Alternatively, you could chose to work, and fair cheaper, with online
services like RadioAirplayPros, RadioDirectX, RMGDigital, and so on, but remember that as
