Get Your Tracks Online
There’s been some discussion on DJ TechTools lately about whether or not a DJ needs to make original music to become successful. We’ll get into that more later, but in my opinion, unless you put out terrible stuff, making your own music can only help your DJ career, and it’s a lot of fun.
Besides that, today you don’t need label support or a lot of your own money to make your music available for worldwide digital sale. Some labels may be a big help with marketing, booking and physical media distribution, but a few online services now enable you to easily upload your digital music to the major download stores and keep most of the money earned in sales. Read on to learn more about 3 excellent options including; TuneCore, WaTunes and Rebeat Digital.
TUNECORE
Before TuneCore came along, digital music distributors such as The Orchard, Snowcap and others would place your songs in iTunes, eMusic, and other such stores. But those services don’t accept all music, and they keep a fairly hefty chunk of the proceeds of your music sales. TuneCore was the first service that let anyone post their music to digital download stores that only charged fixed, up-front fees. TuneCore doesn’t take any cut of your music sales.
With TuneCore, you can upload music to 16 of the most-used online stores, including all five of the iTunes stores, Rhapsody, Amazon MP3, eMusic, IMVU, Lala, Shockhound, Amie Street, LimeWire Store and Nokia. You can also use Amazon On Demand, which uses your digital music to sell CDs that are created as people buy them, so you don’t need to press up a big batch of CDs yourself.
There are two pricing schemes with TuneCore. You can upload a single track to all the available stores for a yearly fee of $9.99. You can take music down from TuneCore at your discretion, but otherwise you’ll be charged the yearly fee.
To upload an album, which TuneCore describes as a group of two or more tracks, you start with a yearly fee of $19.98 per album, then you pay $0.99 for each song and the album and $0.99 for each store you want to upload to. For example, a 10-track album that you upload to all 16 available stores would cost: $45.72 up front ($19.98 yearly fee + $9.90 for 10 songs + $15.84 for 16 stores) and $19.98 per year after the first year.
You upload your music, album art, etc. through TuneCore’s web interface, where you can also check your accounting page to see what you’ve sold and how much you’re owed. Again, TuneCore doesn’t take any cut of the sales, and the amount of money you earn for each song or album sale depends on the policies of each download store. If you don’t already have UPC and ISRC codes for your music (which are essential for processing payments), TuneCore generates them for you for free.
Some other resources you get with TuneCore include PDF guides on music marketing, mastering, publishing, mixing, copyright, vinyl and online music selling tips. You can also create a widget that lets people stream and buy your music, and you can quickly place the widget in your website, blog and all your social networking sites. Finally, you can place music videos for sale in the iTunes music store for $85 per video (less than five minutes long).
WATUNES
Just a few months old, WaTunes actually uploads anyone’s music to iTunes for free and to a few other stores for a per-album fee. Coming at the end of September, WaTunes promises a VIP service that will cost $29.95 per year. For that price you’ll be able to upload all your music to a total of 64 online locations, including iTunes, eMusic, Napster, Amazon, Rhapsody, Last FM and others. VIP members will also get free weekly iTunes Trending Reports—detailed reports on your iTunes sales, including the zip codes of the customers buying your music. (TuneCore charges $2.98 each for those reports.)
Like TuneCore, WaTunes lets you keep all the proceeds from your music sales and gives you free UPC and ISRC codes. The WaTunes music submission process is similar to TuneCore; you create an online account and upload music and images through the web interface. One difference is that WaTune requires 320kbps MP3 files, while TuneCore recommends submitting 16-bit/44.1kHz WAV files.
While the WaTunes low-cost business model may seem too good to be true, I suspect that the company has ties to or receives kickbacks from the music marketing and mastering services that it endorses. Time will tell if this young player can survive in the game and make a dent in TuneCore’s momentum.
REBEAT DIGITAL
Another fresh upstart, German company Rebeat Digital takes a little different approach. Rebeat has no annual fees, but it does have some up-front costs and takes 15% of your royalties from sales (this amount varies according to the download store’s policies). But what you get for that cut of your royalties is blanket distribution to hundreds of download sites worldwide. Rebeat’s complete store list is by far the most comprehensive and include’s the most amount of European and other non-American sites. Rebeat even includes Beatport in its list, which surprises me because Rebeat lets anyone upload music, and Beatport is known for not accepting just any music indiscriminately. Incidentally, some other sites that don’t accept blanket submissions, such as Traxsource and Dance Tracks Digital, are not on Rebeat’s list.
Rebeat has its own software app that you use to upload your music. The Mac/PC software costs 99 Euros and gives you permanent access to Rebeat, so you’ll only pay once for the software. (At the time of this writing, 1 euro = $1.46US.) Rebeat’s software helps you upload all your song information, album artwork, music (16-bit/44.1kHz WAVs) and shows your all your sales and accounting information.
Unlike the other two services, Rebeat does charge 5 euros for UPC codes, of which you need one per album, and 1 euro for ISRC codes, of which you need one per song. There is also a one-time storage free of 1 euro per song upload. So for example, uploading a 12-track album with codes would cost: 29 euros (12 for storage and 17 for the codes). That’s a little less than what you would pay on TuneCore, and with Rebeat, you don’t have annual fees. Rebeat takes a cut of your royalties, but it does put your music in more stores than anyone else.
WHICH SERVICE IS RIGHT FOR YOU?
There are many similarities to the three services listed here. For example, they all say that it takes about 4-6 weeks (and sometimes longer) for your music to go live in all the stores they service, and they all pay monthly and say that it takes 30-45 days after the sale for your royalties to appear in your account.
All three are also purely distributors, meaning they don’t pick and choose whose music to accept, nor do they market or promote their customers. WaTunes endorses marketing/promo services for hire, and TuneCore gives you advice and will point you to promo services as well. Rebeat offers its customers’ music on a promotional basis to a network of more than 2,000 registered media and radio outlets, but Rebeat does not promote its customers directly.
TuneCore has had the longest time to work on its service, and as a result, it’s interface has the most spit-and-polish to it, as well a cool widget and plenty of information to help you sell your music. While TuneCore can put you in the most-visited online stores, it doesn’t take the blanketing approach of the others that can spread your music out even wider.
WaTunes seems to offer a great value and charges the least amount overall. It’s such a new service, however, that it’s interface is still a little rough around the edges. And it’s VIP Service hasn’t even launched yet, so we’ll just have to see how WaTunes performs.
Rebeat offers the most comprehensive worldwide digital distribution, including a high concentration in Europe. For electronic music producers who may not be counting on a huge amount of sales but want to be available in the most appreciative markets, Rebeat sounds like an attractive choice. You pay less money up front to post music and no annual fees. While Rebeat does take 15% of your royalties from sales, that’s still much less than the older guard of didgital distributosuch as The Orchard and Snowcap.
Also, Rebeat is offering a special trial version of the Rebeat Digital software to readers of DJ Tech Tools who want to check it out. This trial version will be fully functional for you to upload three of your tracks and put them into distribution. To take advantage of that offer,
1) Go to this Rebeat register page and register using this code in the CD-Key field: 104E486476. Registration will include having to send a scan of a government ID (drivers license or passport). Note: use Option B with the field for the CD key.
2) Rebeat will mail you your access codes within 1 business day.
3) Download and install the software.
4) Log-in with your codes and upload your tracks.
Send questions to support@rebeat.com
September 14th, 2009 at 6:01 am Quote
Amazing article with a wealth of info. Thanks for the post, gonna jump on these.
September 14th, 2009 at 6:02 am Quote
i’ve been using Juno Download on and off for the last couple of years, admittedly they sizable chunk of the proceeds, but no cost for the service and you can pick when the tracks go live.
Though it is just that one site that it goes up on, but there are quite a few you can do it with, just tell them your a label and you’re away. I also used Track It Down in the same way, but prefer the Juno ‘Label Management System’ page so most stuff on there.
September 14th, 2009 at 7:03 am Quote
thanks! useful info as i’m looking for distributors at the moment :)
September 14th, 2009 at 7:05 am Quote
and one question. how does rebeat get your/your small labels tracks to BEATPORT? and do they actually do that?
September 14th, 2009 at 10:25 am Quote
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Good article!
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September 14th, 2009 at 10:42 am Quote
Well, time to get some stuff copyrighted. :)
September 14th, 2009 at 2:52 pm Quote
Again very nice article markkus!
There is anyway to see how many Brazilian IPs accessing and buying on these stores per/day?
Like a Country Graph of access or something?
If there is, please include on the original post, it would be nice. :)
September 14th, 2009 at 3:56 pm Quote
I remember I read something on rebeat that they dont guarantee that all your tracks will be on beatport. I think that there is a catch with the beatport thing. There is also believedigital.com who offers a similar service
September 14th, 2009 at 4:09 pm Quote
Vinicius:
TuneCore and WaTunes make available iTunes Trending Reports, which show you where the people live who are buying your music. But I’m pretty sure that the iTunes Store is not available in Brazil yet–is it? I will try to follow up with Rebeat about this.
September 14th, 2009 at 4:58 pm Quote
Its available since Itunes version 7.7, but I dont use it…
We dont have many people that buy music from stores, we have a very high p2p population instead…
September 14th, 2009 at 6:02 pm Quote
markkus,
Thank you for the mention. You wrote a great article. It’s musicians like yourself that will help our company succeed. WaTunes is an amazing idea and company and am glad to be apart of it. WaTunes N.E. will launch as expected and we have very, very high expectations for it. I hope all of you give us a try, we will be the best at what we do. If anybody has any direct questions/comments/concerns email them to info@watunes.com and we’ll take care of them for you.
Tony Pytleski
VP, http://www.watunes.com
tonypytleski@watunes.com
September 14th, 2009 at 6:23 pm Quote
RE: BeatPort and Rebeat
I’ve received a reply from a gentleman named Siddhu who works with Rebeat:
“Robert at REBEAT explained to me that the material that they send through to Beatport goes through a selection process to make sure that it is appropriate for Beatport – i.e. It’s not a reggae/pop/rock ballad for instance.
He said there is an 85% success rate for getting stuff onto Beatport.”
So there you go. With Rebeat, you have a possible, but not guaranteed, avenue into Beatport’s store. First Rebeat chooses what to send to Beatport and then Beatport decides what to accept. From this we can reasonably assume that Beatport trusts the taste of the Rebeat people, otherwise would they even bother accepting Rebeat’s submissions?
September 14th, 2009 at 7:18 pm Quote
but beatport has 8 or 4 weeks exclusive period. the tracks can only be in beatport then and nowhere else. how does it work with rebeat?
September 14th, 2009 at 10:07 pm Quote
Great article!
But i have few questions:
1) Payment. What do i need to get my money?
2) Rights. What do i need to prove my rights for the tune?
3) Is all this digital heaven availabe for Russian Musicians?
September 14th, 2009 at 10:11 pm Quote
Great post – this is exactly what we did – there are no barriers to releasing your own music these days, so get in there and do it! Feel free to check out our stuff at http://cartoonbeats.com.
For our first EP we used a local aggregator to get on iTunes and also used http://audiolife.com to have an embedded store.
However, in the future we plan on using http://www.recordunion.com/, who have very reasonable costs and can get on lots and lots of stores, including all the important ones like eMusic, Juno, iTunes etc. So if you’re looking into selling mp3s, I recommend you take a look at Record Union.
September 15th, 2009 at 12:51 pm Quote
I know that the 4 or 8 week exclusive period exists in the agreement of some distributors, particularly SomeCutzUpAggregation.com, but Rebeat still insists that it has no such agreement with Beatport. I’ll try to find out from Beatport directly, but I have a strong inkling that the exclusive agreement is something that Beatport negotiates separately with certain distributors. Let’s face it, the caliber and reknown of the some of the artists on the site is high enough that it’s hard to imagine them all being bullied into a 1 or 2 month exclusive deal.
September 16th, 2009 at 10:25 am Quote
Thanks for the article, great comparison! This is what I mean when I urge people to “do their homework.” Every service is different: use this article as a launching pad for your own investigation.
First and foremost, look at every company’s Terms and Conditions. Do they take your rights? Is there any period of exclusivity? What if you want to cancel? How are payments made? And even more importantly, ask yourself what you want out of your distributor: you can be in zillions of stores, but if they don’t pay more than a penny or two a year, what are you giving up for that inclusion? If you consider a distributor that only goes to a few stores, why, and what do you get out of it?
Thanks again, holler if you’ve any questions about TuneCore or the industry!
–Peter
peter@tunecore.com
September 17th, 2009 at 5:23 am Quote
Hi,
does someone know anything about IODA? Because their homepage don´t say anything about them…
Thanks,
Sophie
September 17th, 2009 at 5:06 pm Quote
Hi Markkus,
Excellent article and thank you for giving WaTunes a mention. As Peter of Tunecore is stating, Its all about your approach. What would you like from your distributor? Do you want pay per album? per year? for free? Do you want your distributor to be exclusive? What if you want to cancel? Do you have to pay any upfront cancellation fees? What is the turnaround time for delivery? How fast will your distributor respond to your questions if you need help?
All of these comes into play when you’re doing your homework on a distributor. As an end result, you should be more satisfied with your distributor’s services and be able to keep up long last relationship with them for the long haul. As Tony Pyleski of WaTunes mentioned, we’re creating a much more powerful service as we make our distribution turnkey solution one of our core components. For more information about what’s happening at WaTunes, check out our site, our blogs, and facebook. Let us know if you need anything at all as we’re here to help you succeed. :)
Kevin Rivers
CEO, WaTunes.com
September 23rd, 2009 at 9:16 am Quote
wow thanks a bunch man, I’ve been trying to find out how to do this!
October 18th, 2009 at 8:03 am Quote
Beatport doesn’t accept ANY uploads from Rebeat! Only electronic music of course and only if it’s “good”!