Things you should know to upload music with music distributors
In today’s time in the music industry, the significance of making your music available on digital platforms is irrefutably huge. Every music listener is using iTunes, Spotify or Beatport to access the music they’re fond of. Thus, if your songs are not up there for the selection, you’re losing out on an awful lot of your audience.
However, getting your music positioned on these digital music stores can prove to be difficult, as the stores do not prefer accepting submissions from individual artists and labels directly. Their primary focus is on selling the music, and thereby depend on a network of trustworthy companies to organize and deliver maximum portion of their content.
Music distributors are companies that have their focus on getting the music from the artist to the stores – physical or digital. Moreover, with a downfall in physical sales of cassettes and CDs, and rising share of digital sales, most music distributors have gradually shifted focus from the traditional physical products to the modern-day digital distribution, supplying music to an extensive variety of online platforms and stores – from iTunes to Beatport to Spotify. Thus, these are rightfully called ‘aggregators’.
Different platforms prefer doing business with professionals for content delivery, and also because they assist artists in meeting with each of these stores’ varying requirements for submission. The tracks and its formatting and editing along with sales pitch accompanying a submission to iTunes is very different from what it is for Spotify. Many of the music distributors are aware of these minor specifications, and have installed software systems that automate the entire process and save a great amount of musicians’ time.
Maximum contribution to digital music sales come from a few online stores like iTunes, Amazon, Spotify, and Pandora, with almost 70% market share coming from iTunes. Beatport, JunoDownload and Traxsource are the leaders in dance music genres. Thus, it is important to go with music distributors who are on these stores’ preferred lists.
Furthermore, there are many aggregators available in the market, but there is a key characteristic that differentiates some aggregators from the rest. Some are big and serve a large number of clients, while others are small in size and specialize in their client base. Bulk aggregators usually do business with individual artists, and occasionally with labels. The pre-selection for artists they deal with is minimal and they’re not usually huge on personal customer support. Specialized aggregators, on the other hand, perform in-depth pre-selection process on their customers and seek to work exclusively with individuals they feel have the potential.
