This guide will help you overcome the difficult subject that is digital music distribution. Want to know how to choose from the great quantity of different distributors, figure out which one is best for you and ensure that you’ve paid attention to all important details? Continue reading. In today’s music industry, the importance of having your music on digital channels is undeniably large. Everyone’s using iTunes, Spotify and Beatport to obtain the music they like, and if your stuff isn’t there for the choosing, you’re not playing ball. To back this up, allow’s look at the numbers. In 2013, IFPI reported that now an impressive 35% of the global music industry’s revenue is via digital channels. 20% of this is coming from subscription based streaming providers. In Europe, streaming services even take into account 31% of total sector revenue. Now this is something all you independent artists and labels already know. But, getting the music positioned on these digital shops can prove difficult, as the stores themselves hardly ever accept submissions from labels and performers.

They are focused on selling the music, and depend on a network of trusted companies to curate and deliver the majority of their content. That's where distributors come in. They are the companies focused on getting the music to the shops. Back in the day, this might entail making sure the CD’s or vinyls would be for sale at the right record stores, at the right time. Nowadays, with the loss of physical product sales and increase of digital revenues, virtually all distributors that centered on physical products today also offer digital distribution. And, music cd distributors -new distributors have sprouted that focus exclusively on ‘digital music distribution’. In this article, we’re going to concentrate on the latter. Digital music distributors need to supply music to a wide variety of online stores and solutions. From iTunes to Spotify to Beatport. That is why they’re often called ‘aggregators’. Most of these different stores prefer dealing with distributors because of their content delivery, but likewise have differing submission requirements.

The tracks, formatting, editing and sales page that complements a submission to iTunes isn't the same as it really is for Spotify. Needing to go through this technique by hand is hugely frustrating, which is why several distributors are suffering from software systems to automate this process. It’s important to remember that digital distributors have far less working costs than regular distributors used to. There is absolutely no physical inventory to store, no real shipments to be produced and no copies to become pressed.