All products and services featured are independently chosen by editors. However, Billboard may receive a commission on orders placed through its retail links, and the retailer may receive certain auditable data for accounting purposes.
Distributing your music as an independent artist can be tricky. Yes, you have outlets like Soundcloud, Bandcamp and even YouTube, but if you’re looking to move your work over to major platforms including Apple Music, Spotify or Tidal, it’s not as easy as hitting the upload button. To help distribute your music to an even wider audience, here’s everything you need to know about distributing your music as an independent artist.
For signed artist, your label should take care of all this for you, but if you’re independent, to share your music on major streaming platforms you’ll have to go through a third-party distributor. With sites like DistroKid, the process to upload your music becomes a lot more simpler.
The platform will handle most of the work for you, pushing tracks and albums to major streamers, automatically adding metadata and song credits to each platform, schedule release dates and upload as many track as you want while you keep 100% of the profit. More recently, DistroKid also added a direct-to-fan platform, called DistroKid Direct, that lets independent artists create an online store to sell their merch. The best part? Artists also get to keep 100% of their earnings.
How to Distribute Your Music to Apple Music and Spotify
DistroKid offers a variety of tiered memberships with different perks. Starting at just $2.08, the Musician tier offers you unlimited music uploads, your lyrics in Google, a Spotify verified check mark and royalty splits. There’s also the Musician Plus plan, which is slightly more pricier at $3.75/month, and includes everything listed above, as well as synced lyrics in Apple Music, daily streaming stats, a customizable label name, release dates, and even adjustable iTunes pricing. Finally, their most premium plan, the Ultimate tier, offers artists free iPhone app access, 1TB instant file sharing and adding contact info for thousands of playlists for $7.50/month.
Whatever tier you decide to go with, artists are given tons of freedom on how to distribute your music and when. When it comes to royalties, Distrokid automatically splits earnings amongst all collaborators whether its producers, song writers, or artists, to make sure everyone involved within the project is equally and fairly paid.
Once you create a profile and choose your tier plan, all the tools to upload, share and distribute your music is right at your finger tips. So, if you’re looking to grow audience, DistroKid is a great option to freely share your music on major platforms.
