As an independent artist, you can’t directly sell your music to online stores, you have to go through ‘music aggregators’. DistroKid, as their site says ‘is a service for musicians that puts your music into online stores so that people can buy it.’ (‘no date’). A simple but clear definition that explains easily what an aggregator in music do. By submitting via DistroKid, the annual fee is $19.99 for 1 artist or band name, 35.99 for 2 and 79.99 for 3. In all of them, you can upload unlimited song. The ‘pro’ of Distrokid is that you keep 100% of royalties, you just pay an annual fee. However, when you stop paying the annual fee, your music is erased of the market. Some musicians might be afraid of that rule as they’d like to know that their …show more content…
(CrunchBase, ’last updated’: 2016) However, the difference of the fee is consequent. $29.99 an album for the first year, then $49.99 each following year and $9.99 for a single. DistroKid (‘no date’) related that : ’If you wanted to upload 5 albums, TuneCore would charge you $149.95 year-one, then $249.95/year forever. DistroKid would charge you only $19.99 per year’. It’s obvious that DistroKid seems like a much better deal than TuneCore, but by digging a little big further, we can see that the quality customer service has a better reputation at TuneCore than DistroKid : Scofield, J. (2015) said that the support is ‘Support is very, very minimal (…) they only have email support (…) takes 2-4 days to get a response when you email’ On the other hand, there are some distributors with a commission on the sales but no membership fees, such as CDBaby, that also allow you to sync your music. Syncing, as CDBaby (‘no date’) explains ‘anything where a song is synced to moving images’, that refers to films, TV shows, commercials and video …show more content…
However, music downloads market is decreasing in profit of streaming services, and the curve of the ARPU (average revenue per user) in the music downloads would highly decrease in the next few years according to Statista (2016). With a grow of ’45.2%’ (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, 2016) streaming is a big subject that emphasised these last years. But how much can a DIY artist earn with it? According to McCandless (2015), Spotify pays an unsigned artist $0.007 per play. Therefore, the artist needs to achieve at least 180,000 plays in order to make the United States monthly minimum wage of $1,260. Even worse, an unsigned artist earns $0.0018 per play on YouTube, and so has to achieve 700,000 views to obtain the minimum wage. This is understandable because YouTube, in contrast to Spotify, is a free streaming service, where money is earned from advertisements rather than paid downloads or subscriptions. SoundCloud is also a streaming service that we have to consider. Indeed, there is a way to earn money through Soundcloud by monetising your