Wendy Day explains how music gets to Spotify and Apple Music. Independent artists choose between DIY aggregators like TuneCore that keep 100% of royalties, or mid-tier distributors like Empire that take a cut. Pick an established distributor because margins are thin and many new services fail.
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Hey guys, Wendy Day here from Rep Coalition. I'm back! So I've been missing for a minute. I've been so busy with work that I haven't had a chance to, um, do these videos. So, uh, here I am. Today I'm going to talk about distribution. It seems to be an area where many artists are really confused, so I'm going to see if I can squash some of that confusion and make it kind of easy for you. So the basic reason for distribution— and I'm going to be really simplified here— the basic reason of distribution is to get your music from your possession, like your laptop, onto the DSPs, the digital service providers. So that's Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, Deezer, um, Amazon, wherever your fans go in order to consume music. And I'm not talking about the free platforms here. I don't mean like SoundCloud and YouTube. I mean the DSPs, the places that charge a membership fee monthly for fans to access music. So the basic way to get your music up there, if you're relatively new to this, the most simple way is TuneCore and DistroKid. I call them the do-it-yourself providers. They're for people that want to have some ownership of their music or total ownership of their music and they want to be able to control the process of getting their music out there. And this is for somebody who might want to eventually sign to a record label or somebody that wants to stay independent forever. The great thing about TuneCore and DistroKid is you pay a flat fee and then they pay you 100% of the income that your music earns. So in the case of of TuneCore, which is a little bit more costly than DistroKid, you pay $30 a year to upload an album or $50 for every subsequent year after that album is uploaded, or you pay $10 per single per year. And again, it's an annual fee, but you keep 100% of the money. There is a lag time on paying you. I believe it's 90 days. With DistroKid, it's also 100% of the money that they're paying you, but in the case of DistroKid, you're paying $20 a year as a flat fee, and then you can upload as much music as you want, singles or albums, to the platform. So all you need to do is go on to either one of their websites, set up an account, and off you go. They both offer, um, different services. I don't know how good their services are because I've never utilized them for their services. And what I mean by services are publishing, um, help with marketing, help with promotion, I prefer to control that stuff myself, and if you prefer to do that yourself, then you should assemble a team. The next level of distribution that I'm going to talk about are the 80/20 splits, and that, that's the distribution companies where you have to go through a process of being accepted by them for them to deliver your music. And that would be like an Empire or AWAL, United Masters, Symphonic. Um, I'm drawing a blank. Stem. There's many, many, many, many distributors out there. You want to make sure whoever you go with is legitimate and will be in business tomorrow because so many distributors popped up. There is grave concern from a lot of us in the industry that they're not all going to last. The margins are very, very, very tight in distribution. They're very slim. So you want to make sure that whoever you're doing business with is going to be here for the long run. You don't ever want to be missing money, right? So most of those companies that I mentioned do 80/20 splits. I forgot to mention Orchard. They're also a distributor. Um, some of them will advance money to you if you need money to do marketing and promotion. And remember, they're distributors. They don't do anything except put your music up on the platforms and collect your money for you. That's their job. That's all they're supposed to do. So if you you need extra services like marketing and promotion, you need to come to them with a team, with some new know-how, and you need to have a budget to be able to, you know, hire the proper publicist or the digital marketing company or the influencer marketing company, or you got to be able to pay for your own promo tour. If you don't have funding, there are some companies that will listen to your music and figure out you know, what your buzz is already in the marketplace, if you've got a movement already, they may advance you some funds. But remember, the more money they advance you, the less money you're going to get in the split, and you're going to have to pay that advance back. So if you go through like an Empire or AWAL or Amuse or even United Masters, those companies do advance funds, but instead of an 80/20 split where you're going to retain 80% of the money and they're going to keep 20%, the deal may become a 70/30 or 60/40 or 50/50 or anywhere in between. If you want to avoid having to get a lesser split from your, from your distributor, then you're going to need to find an investor elsewhere, unless you've already got money that you've put aside from a job or friends and family or an investor or whatever. Wherever you get the money from, Um, if you come with money, then your split is going to go back to that 80/20 split. In the case of a company like Stem, it's going to be 90/10. So there are better deals than 80/20 out there, but you've got to bring a lot to the table. So again, distribution has really slim margins. So the more money you can make for your distributor, the happier they're going to be with you, and the more attention they're going to give you, and the more services they may kick in for that 80/20 split. If you're making your distributor a lot of money, they're gonna love you. They're gonna want to keep you happy. Remember that when you're distributing your music, there's a 90-day lag time from when you get— from when they get paid to when you get paid. So something might sell in January, but you're not getting paid on it until March or April. It's just the nature of this business. So you gotta figure all of that into your budget if you're going to flip your income back into your company, you've got to factor in that 30-day lag time, and that can kind of suck sometimes. At least it does for my clients. It would be better if they could get advanced their funds almost immediately. Not realistic. So in the case of TuneCore and DistroKid, to sum up, they're going to be on a flat fee basis where you pay money up front annually, and then you're able to distribute your music from them. You get 100% split. I don't know what the deals are between TuneCore and DistroKid and the platforms, if they're better or the same as the traditional distributors. So I've tended to shy away from them in terms of utilizing them for folks that have movements because the 80/20 split just feels to me to make more logical sense where the distributor has probably done a better deal with the DSP to get more money because they're taking a smaller piece of the pie. It's just a different business model. So that's the different, um, distribution deals that are out there. I invite you to do a ton more research to really learn how it all works, and then tune into my videos because we're going to be addressing distribution, um, further and more in depth as we go forward with these videos. And I'm so happy to be back. Talk to you soon. Tune in next time. Bye.
