Today I am going to talk about a simple and FREE way to upload your music to the popular streaming services all through a nifty website called ROUTENOTE. I am going to go through the uploading and publishing process to show you how simple it is!
I am not affiliated with this company, although I have been using their service for a couple years now and have been happy with it. I can't promise you great income from the streams, but just having your music available in many places at once is very convenient. I am also pretty certain that there are other companies that would do this service for an upfront fee. While they do take some of your sales or streaming profits(I believe its 15%) it is nice to not have to pay the upfront fee. There is a premium option to pay $10 or whatever and then you keep all the royalties….but I think your better off going with the former-unless you are getting millions of plays.
While It hasn’t ’t been super lucrative for me….I think I’m still a ways off from the minimum pay out, which I believe is $50- I think they will pay out at least quarterly, if not monthly even. One thing that is cool, is how they keep stats of which sites and stores are performing the best for you. By looking at the stats is how I noticed that I did get 6000 views on TikTok somehow-some users randomly posting my tracks in their videos-pretty funny stuff this technology is!…I’m not even on TikTok!
There are so many stores they put your music in(assuming you check all the boxes), including Spotify, Deezer, Amazon, Apple, YouTube and many places that you’ve never even heard of I’m sure….but that’s OK! I figure every new site or app is another opportunity for someone to discover your music! You also can choose all the different markets/countries that the music will be available in.
I’m gonna do a walkthrough of the process to create a new release!
First, we’ll click. “Create new release” under the DISTRIBUTION menu.
If you have a UPC/EAN code on your CD(do they still make those?) or record or whatever, you can enter It in for the release, otherwise just fill out the album title.
Here we can see the main release details page, with the different pieces necessary to complete the upload process. When uploading artwork it has to be exactly a certain size, I believe 3000x3000 pixels, so you may have to resize your album art. Luckily, there are some free online sites that can do this.
On the ALBUM DETAILS page, we can enter the individual track information, with the possibility to have different artists for different individual tracks. You can also enter copyright information and original release date information.
Next comes the part where we upload the audio. Add additional tracks as necessary. It generally works smooth, but I have had its freeze up on me while uploading multiple tracks and not being able to get to 100%, so I recommend only uploading one or two at a time. You also want to make sure to upload them in the correct order, since I don’t think you get an option to rearrange them afterwards.
Remember that part where I said there would be all these stores you have never heard of??? Well, take a look at all those stores! I always check them all except for Facebook….but that’s just me, send your music to all the places that you want it to go!
Make sure you read and follow their terms and conditions- like making sure there are no samples in your music, and probably not submitting cover songs or songs you don’t have the rights to-I’m not a lawyer and I’m not here to go over their fine print, be sure to do you’re own research!
The review process is probably the most tedious part, as you are at their mercy waiting for approval-a process that could take several weeks or a month. Be sure to look in your junk mail for the approval email notification! I had had only a couple of complications/errors after submitting-once it was because they said a couple of my tracks “ended too abruptly” or something like that, so I just went back and did a tiny fade out, no big deal-and it was approved right away. Another time, I had kind of ‘borrowed’ a piece of this indy film called star wars’ intellectual property in a collage and it got rejected-i’m sure they just don’t want to deal with Dianey’s lawyers, so again-use your best judgement and don’t try to get away with anything sneaky!
Here is a look at the statistics page-if you feel bad for my small numbers….feel free to look up DR QUINN and give me a listen-maybe you’ll think I got more plays than I deserve!
So... you can see that my numbers aren't great...in fact, i think it'll take a couple more years at least before I see anything(perhaps that 6000 play month is still waiting to pay, I think it does take 3 months for a final count payment) also, I don't stream really myself -in fact I don't even know how to link to my Spotify artist page or anything-so I'm not necessarily promoting it that much. I don't stream, but there's millions of people that do, so getting out to all those potential people in a free and relatively easy way seems like a no brainer. We have to evolve with the new technologies and you don't want to be the last one left behind!
Have you heard of this company before? What are your experiences? Are there other options you recommend to get your music online? Please leave a comment below.
I would like to see more music- related projects on hive...are there any cool blockchain projects for streaming or downloading that we should know about? I know about Audius, that seems pretty cool, it would be great to have something like that on hive.
Thanks for reading my post, I hope you learned something and perhaps found a new method to get you or a friends music out there for discovery!
*All pics were screencapped by me from the routenote . com website!
I mostly post about synthesizers, experimental electronic music, hip hop, and vinyl... give me a follow if any of that is your bag😎🎹🎚🎼
