Blog
The Song Path: Digital Distribution
Written by Andy Patterson
So, you’ve written your song, you’ve rehearsed it, you’ve recorded it, you’ve mixed it, reviewed it, mastered it and had a CD produced.
How do you get this to the people?
Well, there are a few routes you can go down here. We are going to look at Digital Distribution.
Digital Distribution
So even though you’ve spent time, effort and money on getting your artwork ready for your CD, and had your CD produced, you should realise that there are a large number of people who won’t buy it, not because its not amazing, but because they get all of their music online.
So, how to get your music on iTunes and Spotify is the question…
The Old Days
It used to be really difficult – in the case of iTunes you had to be a VAT registered label whom was registered with Apple etc. but now there are a number of services that can help you get your music out there.
These services generally involve you uploading your mastered tracks to their servers and giving them all the track information (like Names, artists and ISRC and publisher info) and they then
Different services do things in different ways and charge differently respectively.
DITTO MUSIC
Our experiences are all based around Ditto Music and their offerings.
At the risk of this sounding like an advert for Ditto Music, I’ll give you a description of our dealings with them and how it all works.
Your first port of call is to register an account with Ditto. Once created and logged in, you find yourself at what is known at the dashboard. Here you click ‘Create Audio Release’ and this is where is all begins. First step is to upload the audio. These need to be the files you have received from your mastering engineer.
Once your files are uploaded, you need to enter your track information. This includes titles, publishing info and ISRC number. This stands for International Standard Recording Code. More on this in a future post. Ditto can provide this for you, if needed.
You then make a choice of the stores you want your release to be available on (such as iTunes, Amazon, Tesco, Play.com, Spotify etc etc) and once you’ve paid a fee, that’s it. As easy as all that.
Of course, it doesn’t always go smoothly.. We uploaded Tati Kalveks’ album Graceless in good time for the release date of the 22nd January 2012. It arrived on iTunes a week or so late and was missing a track, a problem we’re still waiting on resolution of..
UPDATE: not long after posting this blog, James Cherry from Ditto got in touch to say he’d read the blog and to apologise that we’d had an issue with the system. We sent over the track that day, and it is in the process of being re-packaged and re-uploaded to the various different services. So, much kudos to the guys at Ditto, for keeping track of articles on the web about them, and making sure that we were OK. We’re very grateful to James at Ditto for getting this sorted out for us.
We’ll let you know when Graceless is up and running again..