Digital distribution

#1

i would like to get some of my music into some stores: beatport, and juno download…which digital aggregators do you think are good for this?

i use bandcamp a lot these days. use to be selectadisc an actual shop i miss those days ):

#2

Distrokid is good because it just does the mainstream stores and a million little ones

#3

Yea. Another vote for Distrokid.

#4

Originally this thread was about releasing on spotify and stuff, but it was renamed and really holds a lot of fantastic information and opinions from all of us about digital distro. Check it out! I think you might find some good info and answers :slight_smile:

#5

I’m still trying to figure out who uses Juno and Beatport if mostly everything is available to stream elsewhere

#6

@xNOiSEx DJs mostly. Juno and Beatport pretty much cover all the major minor and minor minor dance labels in all genres.

#7

I don’t know, can’t make up my mind up Bandcamp is pretty decent to find new stuff. Only had a few sales there and downloads. I think I’ll only be putting out one or two releases and a few singles a year.i haven’t used juno or bearport to buy music for ages. But i guess with the other places it’s catering for listeners who use these things :confused:

#8

The main thing about Bandcamp, I feel, is you really have to direct most people to your music. Searching for new music on Bandcamp is terrible IMO. I’m not saying you won’t have to direct people on Beatport or Juno, but I feel like there is a way better chance someone will randomly find your music there. Beatport especially encourages wandering that ends up being fruitful.

At least on Beatport and Juno there seems to be some kind of policing with genre tags. On Bandcamp at least half of what gets put under house and techno is not.

Unless you know the “trick” of looking through other people’s collections on Bandcamp, as much as I like it, it feels a bit like soundcloud–just storage space (pretty customizable storage space).

At the end of the day I don’t think it matters where you upload your music really, you have to put in the leg work to direct people to it. That is the big thing. I’d spend my time thinking about that.

And yea, Beatport and Juno are almost exclusively used by DJs these days…or at least people looking for dance music.

#9

Bandcamp’s “Discover” is actually quite nice, given the amount of niche subgenres you can look. But there’s no quality filter… and generally filtering it by popular / best selling / new never really grants you that much gold. I’ve gone through hundreds of pages of “black metal” tagged albums that are not black metal whatsoever. A lot of people don’t tag properly and there’s a lot of litter.

That being said I have found some really great stuff on there, but it takes work… and there’s so many competing artists and albums uploaded on the daily that you really only get that first day of showing up in searches unless you somehow get a lot of presales on a physical that bump you into a popular page roster.

With my black metal band, selling physical copies on bandcamp that also give digital sales is probably the only reason that I still get some sales from the search algorithm (bandcamp emails and tells you when you’ve sold a copy through their search function or google).

I remember trying to get my music on beatport a looooong time ago and IIRC you needed to be on some sort of label to get your music on there. I can’t remember - can you just freely upload?

Also, did you guys hear that soundcloud is now going to start aggregating to spotify/itunes? LoL. fuck, that could be really bad if they keep their awful compression.

#10

You need to use Distrokid or something else to get on Beatport. Pretty sure you can’t just upload.

#11

You can not just upload to beatport

I can see this is old topic, but wanted to chime in with a review might t be helpful:

I’ve been with Symphonic as a distributor for a while, and they changed their plans up last year. I don’t fully understand the new platform, but it works where you submit material, and they decide if it gets picked up to handle the release for free, or not. Which usually leaves you to shop the song elsewhere if they don’t accept it. They do however have a pricing service where they will release the track to your choice of platforms for certain prices. Think it’s like .99 for tier 5 platforms, and unto 10.00 to get it on tier 1 platforms. They will also offer to handle a whole slew of service for you, such as promotions, video distribution, fan engagement, rights management, and many other popular services.