DistroKid - Make Sure Your Music Reaches Your Fans and You Get Paid for It

[Psychotronic]

21 hours ago, TubularCorporation said:

For sure, but I'm not only talking about filter bubbles (although looking at the post you quoted that's mostly what I ended up talking about), it's more wide reaching than that.

 

I don't really have the pationce to write it all out coherently, but if you read this summary of Jaron Lanier's concept of "siren servers" and their effect on business an economy and then consider that in the past 20-25 years economics and "personal brand" have become our primary model for understanding human social behavior and structures (at least in the popular sense (even among people who study that stuff and should really know better - not all of them but way too many) you'll probably have a good idea what I'm getting at.  Among other things, there's a feedback loop between the people who develop the algorithms and interfaces that mediate most of our social interation today basing their work on economic/marketing models of human social behavior, and people (individually and collectively) understanding themselves in terms of economics and marketing. Both of those factorw reward and reenforce each other and you end up with, well, where we are now.

 

EDIT: it looks like Lanier actually has a new book out now specifically about this but I haven't read it.  I generally like what he has to say about thsi stuff, though, even though he tends to be too credulous about human motivations and likes Elon Musk.

Very enlightening. Yes, i agree. Thanks for linking. 

[snack master]

On 12/11/2019 at 11:03 AM, lucivalc said:

It is a useful, affordable platform while youre living on planet earth, but once you depart this life, if no one covers the $20 a year, they pull your entire legacy of music creation offline from all platforms. That is unless you pay a legacy fee at $50 per song, which is outrageous.

Sent from my LM-V405 using Tapatalk
 

just wanted to follow up and clarify that it's not $50 per song, it's $50 per release.

[producer snafu]

distrokid is great, but i can't sell my music because i sample mad copyrighted stuff, so i can only basically upload to bandcamp for my album sales, i don't have enough of a following to gain revanue via spotify, but distrokid is pretty legit if you wanna distribute your shit on various platforms.

[BCM]

I use Distrokid, I've made at least $15 in about 2 years. Totally worth it imo.

[Freak of the week]

holy shit

[Braintree]

14 hours ago, producer snafu said:

distrokid is great, but i can't sell my music because i sample mad copyrighted stuff, so i can only basically upload to bandcamp for my album sales, i don't have enough of a following to gain revanue via spotify, but distrokid is pretty legit if you wanna distribute your shit on various platforms.

FYI, they would probably send you a cease and desist letter before they would outright sue you. At that point you would just tell the distributor to take down all of the albums being sold.

[user]

On 12/20/2019 at 10:28 AM, BCM said:

I use Distrokid, I've made at least $15 in about 2 years. Totally worth it imo.

bragging computer musician 

 

[marf]

All these thieving streaming sites need to be charged by ascap or some entity to collect fair royalties. And artists should know what they deserve.

It's no different than the radio. So pay like the radio

[TubularCorporation]

This guy's presentation style is a little grating but he has a point.

 

 

[thawkins]

The charitable explanation is that since that payment went over $10k, it triggered some money laundering laws and the Distrokid customer support wanted to hide all this in order to handwave everything away as "taxes and issues".

But in general it looks like Distrokid truly is too good a deal to be true (meaning that it is not "true"). I guess I won't get hit because... I don't make any money on anything.

[mcbpete]

A cautionary tale if you're on the Content Creation side of things:

I believe @briskhas had quite a negative experience with them so would be interesting to have his first hand experience on the platform...

[thawkins]

So what's a reliable alternative to a service like this which will upload my stuff to different platforms? I don't really mind if they take a cut of the royalties (any % of 0 is still 0).

[thawkins]

After watching that last video, I wanted to go about playing devil's avocado here though: I've recorded albums with a band in the past that have been played on the radio, and the existing royalties collection and management and representation thing seems to work much in the same way.

Basically if you ever want to get paid money if your stuff gets played on the radio, you have to register yourself as an artist-author-etc on that quasi-governmental copyright management organization that keeps track of EVERYTHING and collects royalties for you from all over the world, takes a cut and then gives you some as well each year.

Different to Distrokid, that service does not really cost you, except you just have to file your new songs and also fill out some "repertoire sheets" or something like that when you play live concerts (I have seen those a couple of times, nobody actually bothered to fill it properly), so that when you play a cover, the original author-artist gets a cut or something.

And (I think) if you do not register yourself with the authority, then as they get paid by the radio stations and whatnot, what would be your cut is actually shared between the artists that did register themselves. The sums are of course laughably small unless you are a really really big name.

 

tl;dr is that seemingly it's been always on the artist (or someone on behalf of the artist) to claim their copyrights at the proper place. I guess YouTube and DistroKid have just exploded and enhanced the bureaucracy to a new order of magnitude.

 

Just to make it clear: I don't think it should be OK for some rando to claim authorship of your material and cash the royalties. This is completely a failure of DistroKid and YouTube.

[brisk]

1 hour ago, mcbpete said:

A cautionary tale if you're on the Content Creation side of things:

I believe @briskhas had quite a negative experience with them so would be interesting to have his first hand experience on the platform...

The issue in the video is pretty much something that plagues all the digital distro services and is an unfortunate side-effect of having the entire process automated (or with very few human eyes/ears involved as possible). There's little stopping copyright trolls from doing this, other than sending DMCA's or making sure you have all your music distributed yourself, to prevent others doing it. Relying on Distrokid's customer service (which fucking sucks) to help is going to be a loooooooong battle, as this guy found out, but honestly, this could happen to any distro broker, not exclusive to Distrokid.

Anyway, I have used Distrokid since late 2016 and don't really recommend them to other people any more. They're fine if you just want to have your music on the major music platforms, but as I said, their customer service is atrocious, they have automation rules that prevent you from uploading your music if it doesn't adhere to ultra-strict naming schemes dictated to by Spotify, Apple Music etc.. (good luck if you have tracks like Part 1, Part 2 etc..) and they also had a period about a year ago where they were nearly 2 months late with Spotify payments. Oh and the guy in charge is a bit of an idiot, who literally tried promoting the idea of payola (an illegal practice of paying playlist makers to feature your music on their playlists) until he got shamed into deleting it on his Twitter page a day later. He does stupid shit like this a lot and comes across as a bit of a greasy twat.