I’ve been putting my stuff on youtube for a while and my soundcloud is pretty much maxed out. What music distro do you recoomend? I’m from a country with a pretty ass curency so every dollar is a x4 for me. Lots of youtubers promot distrokid so thats my first consideration, thoughts?
Previously…
There’s many other threads on this topic. Search engine is your friend
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True, but this stuff does change over time. User agreements, policies, pricing, and product offerings are all different than they were in 2022. I wouldn’t mind a new thread or choosing one to be the definitive Distributor comparison topic, personally.
I kind of wanted to hear from people on this forum. Things change all the time and maybe a reddit post from 2 months ago is already out-dated.
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I tried distrokid.
It did precisely fuck all for me.
All the streaming platforms are the same in my opinion. You get shafted no matter what.
Bandcamp and direct sales are the way to go.
But hey, thats just my opinion, based on my experience. Dont take my word for it.
Comment from june last year, from a forum user.
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I used cdbaby for my release. Pay one time ($20?) and it is published “forever”. Distrokid needs yearly payments. I’m considering a separate “unlimited releases” distrokid account to release singles on (ie. releases singles much more often).
How has your overall experience with Bandcamp been? I’ve been considering putting more of my music on platforms like CD Baby, but haven’t been very motivated by it. Bandcamp seems to be more focused on niche communities, which I find interesting. Would you say it’s been a good platform for reaching the right audience?
Well put it this way, Ive sold more albums on bandcamp than using any thing else.
Ive had more plays on bandcamp than anything else. It costs me zero to use bandcamp.
Its easier to use than anything else Ive tried.
Reaching the right audience? Shit man I have no idea. Daniel Troberg bought one of my albums, if he likes my music enough to buy it, thats good enough for me.
Basically 100% positive.
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I distribute on Soundcloud for Artist, but it is not clear for me how to get paid after moneytization
…if u got no publisher in ur back, ur basically screwed these days, left alone in self promoting wonderland, at least if ur not in ur twenties, still full of enthusiasm and the will for absolute self exploitation…
even the biggest labels never sign u, if ur not already a selfmade social media hero with some decent amount of followers…
it takes sooo much more these days, than just producing good music of any kind…
vast majority gets lost in the attention economy while everybody lacks of at least some minimum of bottom end attention span…it’s growing more and more into a full blown desaster…
distrokid is nothing but a souless scam these days…owned in large percentage by spotify…
ur best chance to get some money out of the game, if ur all on ur own, is bandcamp…and even there, u better have a little more to offer than “just” ur music…
that and the never the less still valid promise of “broadcast urself” on utube, where u also have to offer more than just single music clips is for now the best way to go…
alphabeth/google/utube remain the biggest and the most reasonable all content platform there is…sad but truu…while bandcamp remains the last recordstore of the planet…
streamingfarms still say, they can’t do the only truu valid and fair payment model, the userbased one, still cheat around with behind the curtain xtra deals for some big coop brands, gambling on ur hopes via emtpy promisses like selfowned digital distributors like disrokid, while utube operates xactly that way since the beginning of information age economy…
at least, they have a reasonable threshhold of engagement with a strictly attached but clear monetization concept of rules, which is indeed a sort of userbased paymodel, that all other streamingfarms still try to avoid and state they can’t do it, can’t play the fair game…
for now, it’s still valid to say, if ur not happening on spotify/apple music/deezer and what not, ur just not happening…but that’s not really the case anymore, or at least soon enough not really anymore…
keep in mind, even the biggest acts must sell live tickets and merch to really make money, since even their global hits, with endless amounts of clicks, just won’t do a real profit trick anymore, while there was statiscally never that much money in the whole game…
so, no, don’t pay any middleman like distrokid…u might wanna look out for a publisher, but don’t look for labels…in the meantime, focus on ur music, focus on a fitting concept around that, focus on frequent relases on bandcamp, focus on frequent content aorund ur music and what might be of any personal intrest behind and around ur process of doing so on utube and be happy, that even small ammounts of people who spent some dime on ur music can help u survive in ur country…
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