Where to expose your music: Less Is More – When you know what ‘less’ is.

Kind-of-Disclaimer: This is highly unprofessional opinion not meant to be construed as advice. It simply works for me. Please take into consideration that this particular array of thoughts should be geared preferably towards first-time/debut releases.

Ok, so my album is finally ready. Wat do?

Logic dictates that tending to select few social media channels will give you more time to be focused, thorough and detailed in your promotion efforts, rather than spreading out too thin over platforms that aren’t really worth the time. This being said, I concluded after much thought that I am not a wizard and I can’t foresee what random event could possibly snowball the band into wild success, because the right person at the right time stumbled upon my crummy Reverbnation profile (hahah, I know). This is an idea further backed by the fact that I’ve only begun to use promotion tools about a week ago, as my debut album got released this very month.

I really wish I was, but I’m not.

You will need plenty of time and patience to go through every channel and fill out info fields and upload all kinds of media – although ironically, time is of the essence at the time of release. Luckily for me, I’m currently not authorized to work in the US until my work permit arrives, and the World Cup ends this week, so yeah, free time. Since the number of sites and communities to engage in is pretty much daunting, the most apparent hazard in going wide across the entire social media gamut is writing half-assed, incomplete profiles that lack songs and information. Just one weak link will tell the listener your project fell through the cracks, even if it actually didn’t. I did my best trying to be as uniform and detailed as I could on each and every site, so here’s to hoping that a couple of weeks of intense community managing will shed light on what is actually working for my particular market, and perhaps even discover the fact that less favoured platforms could yield suprising, good results. Speaking of which – and I’m sure some of you will relate – going for a full-blown aggressive push to get everything published and properly sorted within a week or two goes well with the ethos of inconsistent, procrastinating people such as myself. So here’s the whole list (I hope) of communities where I got my band promoted:

---

Bandcamp (The purported ‘main core’ so to speak)
Facebook
Youtube
Twitter
SoundCloud
Reverbnation
BandPage
MySpace
Last.fm
Grooveshark
Pandora (Approval pending)
PureVolume
Artistlink
Instagram (That’s right)

---

Far fetched, yes indeed. But if you stick to the basic purpose of each site you shouldn’t have trouble achieving real, meaningful response. For instance, my first [and only thus far] Instagram entry was a Cinema 4D render of a mixing workstation I’ve been working on for a while. No ‘download now pls’ attitude to be seen – if anything, the band’s website is posted on the profile, but nothing else. A few hashtags later you have a couple dozen people relating at some level, people that may potentially connect to your music if you generated enough interest. Avoid shoving your tracks up anyone’s face, because quite frankly no one cares about your band on Instagram, nor should they.

Face it, this piece of furniture here is tearing new cloacas.

The yang to this ying consists in publishing/distributing the album on major digital stores. I’ve written a detailed article on how I did this, at zero cost. This entails iTunes, Spotify, Amazon, Google Play, Deezer, Rdio, and other major outlets, and truth be told it was much less time consuming to set up than I’d previously thought. On the other hand, this is a process that may take up to several weeks overall to be completed, so you may want to properly plan ahead if a release date is something of importance to you (each store is able to manage pre-orders and specific release dates as long as it has been uploaded within a reasonable time frame). So I’m just here trying to justify moot efforts, lol As if giving closure to the making of an album wasn’t enough, the subsequent distribution and promotion are unavoidable cans of worms for the DIY crowd, especially for us first-timers. On the bright side, once we sieve through the tools that really connect us to our audience, we’ll be on higher ground when promoting our future work with those who we really mean to connect with. The outcome of this experience should point towards those channels that worked for your case, and likewise indicate when/why to shut down those that didn’t (in a controlled fashion), so as to not waste your precious youth by the time the next release comes up. It’s a herding business. A second part of this article is bound to ensue where I’ll announce success or lack thereof. Guess we’ll have to wait for that one.

 

 

RouteNote: How to publish your music on iTunes, Spotify, Amazon and others totally FREE of charge

When I finally got around to releasing my debut album Battle For Rome, I knew major-outlet digital distribution was gonna be one of those things that isn’t really mandatory but would not make sense skipping, given the amount of time I’d invested in setting up social media stuff and what have you. It is also true that having your record on every regular channel is perceived as a sign of being somewhat serious about what you’re trying to do.

I’d been almost certain to use Tunecore or CDBaby as a digital publishing/distribution option until somehow I stumbled upon RouteNote.

RouteNote is a British-based (I believe) publishing service that offers both a paid and a free distribution model to pretty much every major digital outlet out there. For the sake of sharing the experience, I will jump straight to the free distribution part, which is something many of you may have not imagined ensuing a few years back.

The downfall to having free distribution on RouteNote is keeping only 85% of the sales. This isn’t much of a downer when I’m expecting super low sales (to none) of my debut album, and if a sale were to ensue I’d rather that it happened through a ‘name your price‘ feat on my Bandcamp page.

Hands-on experience with RouteNote.com

As for the actual use of the RouteNote website, it’s a bit sluggish but it does the job. To be fair though, it is indicated that they’re on the process of migrating their systems and things can be buggy at times.

Before publishing they will ask you about the pricing, divided in three vague options: low, mid or high, or regular and unleaded, something like that. I stuck to regular/standard and that is tantamount to a 9.99 USD album on the iTunes Store.

A few days after uploading my material to the RouteNote website, I got a mail from a chap named Liam saying the pending moderation had been successfully approved and I was good to go. Now, it was just a matter of waiting for the digital stores themselves to do their part.

My album Battle For Rome got published on the iTunes Store VERY quickly. The site says you should wait 1-2 weeks but in my case it was up and running probably in 3 or 4 days. As of today (still less than a week from moderation approval) I’ve yet to learn from the other stores. However, I’m giving it a solid vote of confidence seeing how iTunes was already running in what I’d say is record time.

Update: A mere day after posting this entry, Spotify has published the album as well.

Update 2: 11 days later, Amazon is carrying Battle For Rome.

Is RouteNote the weapon of choice for a professional musician?

If I was more serious about this I would have gone down the Tunecore path, no doubt. But since I’m just trying to get the album positioned on Spotify and iTunes Radio to catch potential new listeners, and willing to forego of a 15% chunk for every sale (since I want my earnings to be ‘name your price’ donations from Bandcamp anyway) it makes complete sense that I try RouteNote. Especially since my first release has thus far reaped a grand total of 22 USD – barely a little more than half the price for a yearly Tunecore subscription.

Again, if this was my career I’d probably have a team of people (and a producer that would have talked me out of doing wacky music) that ensured hefty sales of a record upon release. Meaning that losing a 15% of the profits would actually hurt in this particular case. There’s still the RouteNote paid model which retains full profits, but I honestly don’t remember how it fares against other competitors.

Further considerations

Be aware that you may need to ‘whitelist‘ your Youtube channel so that your publishing service doesn’t take down your own material. This is done by mailing the folks at RouteNote; paid-for publishing services may [hopefully] have a more automated method.

Last but not least, do not, under any circumstance, have two publishing services attempt to do the same thing for you. It will bring forth a catastrophe of unforseen proportions and it’s gonna be pretty hard to have iTunes put the reverse gear on either one.

Have at it and happy digital distributing!