J. Anthony Allen explains how music distribution changed from major labels controlling record store placement to independent artists uploading directly to Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon. Learn the steps to upload your tracks, set up metadata, and collect revenue.
Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Musician's Guide to Distribution. So what is distribution? In the old days, it meant getting our albums into the stores. Depending on the kind of music you make, that may or may not be relevant to you. But the term distribution is still very relevant because distribution, or in our case, digital distribution, is the tool we need to get our music onto the streaming platforms and the online sales portals. There was a long time where you couldn't get your music onto Spotify, for example, if you didn't have a record label with a distributor behind you. Distribution was kind of the last great stronghold that the major record labels had that independent artists didn't have access to. But in the digital world, that's not true. So in this class, we're going to go over all the different distribution models, kind of from if you want to press a vinyl record and get it into your local store, or if you want to get it in a national chain of stores, down to digital distribution, nuts and bolts. If you want to get your track on Apple Music, what do you have to do? What do you need in place in order to do that, and what are the steps to do it? And then after you do it, how are you going to collect the money? Because at the end of the day, we got to make the money. So there's no reason that you as an artist, as a maker of music, can't have your tracks up on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon and all the other ones. Within a couple of days, I'm going to tell you how to do it in this class. So let's dive in.
