The wonderful Christopher Carvalho has put together this article for us!

Chris runs Unlock Your Sound — an online resource for artists, producers, and industry professionals.

He has also worked with brands including Tunecore, Distrokid, LANDR, Pirate Studios, Sound Intermedia, Tempa Records, Hotflush Recordings, The London Sinfonietta, ACM, MySphera, and Music Ally.

And most recently, he is the founder of Songcards, where he is making digital music collectable.

Whether you’re self-releasing your first single, or looking for new ways to get your music in front of people, there’s never been more options when it comes to distributing your work.

If you haven’t officially released anything before, you may have uploaded covers to YouTube or uploaded demos to Soundcloud. These are great options as they are free and easy to manage. But when it comes to distributing your music to major consumer platforms such as Spotify and Apple Music, there’s a few more steps in the process.

Music distribution services

These are the platforms that allow you to set up and push your music to the mainstream platforms and kick off your music marketing efforts. Not only that, they also offer a means to manage your releases, register your music, and track the progress of your music as it makes its way through the streaming ecosystem. This includes sales reports, tracking streaming revenues, publishing administration and much more.

One Google search will make it quite clear that there is an abundance of services out there, all with various pricing models and added benefits, so its understanding if you would find it quite overwhelming.

This guide serves to help you navigate those waters and help you find the best process for your and your music.

Some of the most notable music distribution services include:

To further your research and keep up to date with the latest offering from the distributors, bookmark this handy article from Ari Herstand.

YouTube

As you may already know, YouTube has been a popular means of self-distribution for a long time now. And for good reason! YouTube is a globally accessible platform and powerful search engine. Musicians and artists the world over leverage YouTube to release their music and connect with their audience with all manner of content.

What's even more enticing about it is how easy it is to publish. Just make an account and upload and you’re done. No lengthy release process.

As a musician, YouTube is also an obvious destination for your music videos, covers, and lyric videos too.

Whether you’re putting together an album launch, dipping your toes in the water, or anything in between, YouTube is definitely a tool in the toolkit.

Soundcloud

Many musicians know Soundcloud as the first place they upload their music too. Likely due to its ease of use and ability to send private links, especially useful for sending demos to record labels and friends. However, Soundcloud is a streaming platform unto itself and has a rather unique spot in the streaming ecosystem.

Soundcloud has the potential to help you deliver your music freely and build a community around it, but it doesn’t stop there. It should be carefully placed in the series of events that lead up to the official release, meaning the moment your music is available everywhere.

Bandcamp

With a strong foothold in the independent music community, Bandcamp should be strongly considered when looking into all the places to host your music.

At the time of writing this article, the Songtradr owned platform boasts the fact that they have paid artists $192 million in the last year.

Bandcamp is a great place to sell digital albums, singles, merch and more. It’s your own music web store and a great way to connect with fans more directly.

Direct-to-fan

The closer you are to your fans, the better. Sometimes, it’s hard to reach them in the noisy domains of social media and streaming platforms. This is why it’s essential to have a direct-to-fan strategy as part of your release plans.

This includes inviting your fans to visit your website, join your mailing list, WhatsApp groups, Discord servers, or whatever your favourite way to talk to your audience is.

Direct-to-fan tools includes:

Having a central hub (such as a website or ecommerce store) for all of your work is a great way to showcase your catalogue and monetise it in a variety of ways.

Promoting your release

Marketing your music is a creative and iterative process.

As you continue to release your music, you should think of it as a long-term affair, building an online catalogue of music one release at a time.

As much as you should put a lot of effort into every single release, some will seemingly perform better than others. This is totally normal and shouldn’t deflate you.

There are an increasing number of ways you can promote your music, as well as building your artist brand.

Obviously there is social media. Building an audience there and gaining followers and listeners is often a crucial part of the process. But, the buck doesn’t end there. You should see these platforms as a proxy to the meaningful exchanges you have with your fans, whether that be when they stream your music, buy an album, or turn up to your shows.

There are also a wide range of services that can help you get your music in front of influencers, playlisters, streamers, and other tastemakers.

Such services include:

And many more

It’s important to look at the various pricing models and look into the experiences of others as you look into the various services available.

As you continue to build your audience on social media, you will find getting various mentions from these tastemakers to be a good way of putting out content and validating your artist identity.

Social media

Platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, X etc, should be considered as streaming platforms unto themselves. A dance trend on TikTok that is scored by your song can really move the needle in terms of getting people to discover your music. But of course, it’s not easy to make these seemingly random events occur. Making your music available to them is step one, which is part of the role played by your preferred distributor.

Something that’s worth considering is how your fans can engage with your music on these platforms.

Artists such as Beyonce have found creative ways to activate their fans by inviting them to create content on her music. Does your song have a dance to go along with it? Find a way to reward your fans if they post a video dancing to your song in IG reels or TikTok.

Recently, Jared Leto has been making a lot of reaction videos to fans covering his work on TikTok. This creates a viral loop between the artist and their audience.

There’s no cut and dry way to make social media work for you. Much like making music itself, you have to find your voice and work it in a way that’s authentic to you.

Wrapping it all up

As we’ve discussed in this article, there are a lot of moving parts to releasing music, which can make it overwhelming and confusing. This is why it’s important to stay organised and not just keep it all in your head.

Every release is a project, and every project needs management.

Whether you’re doing this solo or as a member of a group, it’s handy to leverage technology to help you stay on top of it all and get it all done.

Tools include:

We hope this article has proven useful. There is a lot to think about, but you don’t have to do it all at once. If this is your first or second release, you might choose to keep it simple at first and leave out some of the above options. Nothing wrong with that. It’s important to remember that they are just tools in the toolbelt, and to find what works best for you.

How to Distribute Your Release