Electronic Music Distribution Features

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Previously, releasing your song was difficult and not accessible to everyone, but at present all you need to do is choose a suitable partner – a music distributor.

A distributor is an intermediary company between a musician and a streaming platform. Streaming platforms are services for listening to music: “VK-music”, “Yandex-music” and others.

What scheme do distributors follow?

When an artist has a song ready he needs to choose a distributor and enter into an agreement with him. Sometimes concluding an agreement is just a matter of registering on the distributor’s website, and sometimes you additionally need to sign a paper agreement.

After registering on the distributor’s website, the artist can add the track he wants to release in his personal account. Along with the track, you will also have to provide all the necessary information about it and metadata. For example, who is the artist, what genre is the track, who are the authors of the lyrics and music, is it the original version or a remix, has this track been released before, does it contain obscene language, and so on.

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Next, you send the track, along with all the information, for moderation. Moderation is the process of checking content for compliance with the distributor’s requirements. Usually they check whether the track is of good quality, whether it is plagiarism, whether everything is in order with the metadata and with the audio file itself.

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The moderation period depends on the rules of a particular distributor, but usually it is several weeks.
After the track has passed moderation, distributors send to streaming platforms. But how long it will appear there depends on the rules of these sites.

Then the artist can only wait until people start listening to and buying his music content. The remuneration accrued for this is sent by the streaming platforms to the distributor, who then goes to the artist’s balance in accordance with the terms of cooperation.
As a rule, music platforms send royalties once a month – 30-60 days after the month in which there were auditions.

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What to consider when choosing a music distributor

We would like to note right away that you need to choose a distributor based on the goals the artist is pursuing. Some people want to leave a mark in the music industry and preserve the memory of this. While others want to develop their creativity, expand their circle of listeners and make money from their music. For example, if an artist does not plan to make money from his creativity, he will not need the marketing tools that a distributor can offer.

Next, we will give criteria that in general you should focus on when choosing a distributor. And in the next block, as an example, we analyze four popular distributors according to these criteria.

The year the company was founded is the first thing you need to pay attention to. In order to show its effectiveness, capabilities and be interesting for the artist, the distributor must work in the market for a long time and establish itself. Some distributors have been working for ten years, and these are worth taking a closer look at.

The number of released releases, artists, labels with which the distributor cooperates. These numbers show the volume of work of the distributor. And from them you can understand whether he is in demand. For example, 100 tracks were released through one distributor. And 1000 through another. Then we can conclude that the latter is more in demand and is worth paying attention to.
As a rule, information about the number of artists and volumes of music content that have passed through the distributor can be found on its website.

Which famous artists cooperate with the distributor: famous artists will not enter into contracts with unreliable companies.
Typically, distributors are proud to work with major artists, so they advertise this on the website. But such information may not be available – to find out for sure/ You can ask the distributor about this directly by writing to technical support.

The distributor’s partners are those companies on whose platforms the musician wants to place his track. To get your music featured on Apple Music, Spotify, UMA, or other platforms that are important to you, you need to make sure that the distributor you choose works with them.

Welofi also has digital distribution, you can find all our releases on schedule page.