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!
Brief Tenderloin 